25 – Clarence Kolb, American actor (born 1874) November 28 – Charles Meredith, American actor (born 1894) November 29 – Anne de Vries, Dutch writer (born 1904) December December 1 Marie-Clémentine Anuarite Nengapeta, Congolese Roman Catholic religious sister (born 1939) J. B. S. Haldane, British geneticist (born 1892) December 2 – Pina Pellicer, Mexican actress (born 1934) December 5 – V. Veerasingam, Ceylon Tamil teacher and politician (born 1892) December 6 – Consuelo Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough (born 1877) December 9 – Dame Edith Sitwell, British poet (born 1887) December 10 – Mariano Rossell y Arellano, Guatemalan clergyman (born 1894) December 11 Sam Cooke, American singer and songwriter (born 1931) Alma Schindler Mahler, wife of Gustav Mahler (born 1879) December 13 – Ernesto Almirante, Italian actor (born 1877) December 14 William Bendix, American actor (born 1906) Francisco Canaro, Uruguayan-born composer (born 1888) December 15 – C. J. Hambro, Norwegian politician and journalist (born 1885) December 17 – Victor Francis Hess, Austrian-born American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (born 1883) December 21 – Carl Van Vechten, American writer and photographer (born 1880) December 22 – Rosa Borja de Ycaza, Ecuadorian writer (born 1889) December 24 – Kuksha of Odessa, Eastern Orthodox priest (born 1875) December 29 – Vladimir Favorsky, Russian artist and engraver (born 1886) December 30 – Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt, German neuropathologist (born 1885) December 31 Ólafur Thors, Icelandic politician, 8th Prime Minister of Iceland (born 1892) Henry Maitland Wilson, British field marshal (born 1881) Nobel Prizes Physics – Charles Hard Townes, Nicolay Gennadiyevich Basov, Aleksandr Prokhorov Chemistry – Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin Physiology or Medicine – Konrad Bloch, Feodor Lynen Literature – Jean-Paul Sartre Peace – Martin Luther King Jr. References External links Leap years in the Gregorian calendar