List of Famous people named W

Wijesinghe Jayaweera Mudiyanselage Lokubandara, was a Sri Lankan politician who was Speaker of the Parliament of Sri Lanka from 2004 to 2010 and Governor of Sabaragamuwa Province from 2010 to 2015. He was a lawyer by profession, and wrote books, poems and songs. He held several ministries in the government of Sri Lanka before his appointment as Speaker of the House.

William Harry Vaughan, Jr. was a professor of ceramic engineering at the Georgia School of Technology and the founder and first director of what is now the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

William Bernard Raymond Lickorish is a mathematician. He is emeritus professor of geometric topology in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, University of Cambridge, and also an emeritus fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. His research interests include topology and knot theory. He was one of the discoverers of the HOMFLY polynomial invariant of links, and proved the Lickorish-Wallace theorem which states that all closed orientable 3-manifolds can be obtained by Dehn surgery on a link.

William Hervey Lamme Wallace, more commonly known as W.H.L. Wallace, was a lawyer and a Union general in the American Civil War, considered by Ulysses S. Grant to be one of the Union's greatest generals.

William Kerr Scott was an American Democratic Party politician from North Carolina. He was the 62nd Governor of North Carolina from 1949 until 1953 and a United States Senator from 1954 until 1958.

William Effingham Lawrence was an American actor of the silent era. He appeared in 120 films between 1912 and 1947. He was born in Brooklyn, New York and died in Hollywood, California.

W. Donn Hayes (1893–1973) was an American film editor active from the 1910s to the 1950s. He worked for a number of Hollywood studios including MGM, Fox Film and Paramount. He was sometimes credited simply as Donn Hayes.

Woodbridge Strong "W. S." Van Dyke II (Woody) was an American film director and writer who made several successful early sound films, including Tarzan the Ape Man in 1932, The Thin Man in 1934, San Francisco in 1936, and six popular musicals with Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. He received two Academy Award nominations for Best Director for The Thin Man and San Francisco, and directed four actors to Oscar nominations: William Powell, Spencer Tracy, Norma Shearer, and Robert Morley. Known as a reliable craftsman who made his films on schedule and under budget, he earned the name "One Take Woody" for his quick and efficient style of filming.