1920 births

Jacques Charon (27 February 1920 – 15 October 1975) was a French actor and film director.
Born in Paris, Charon trained at the Conservatoire national supérieur d'art dramatique (CNSAD) and made his début at the Comédie-Française in 1941. During his time there which lasted until his death, he played over 150 roles in the classical and modern repertoire.
Charon directed the 1968 feature film A Flea in Her Ear and the 1973 television movie Monsieur Pompadour.
He played Spalanzani in the complete recording of The Tales of Hoffmann (Decca, 1971).
Charon was openly gay. He died in Paris and is buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre.

Guy Dejouany (15 December 1920 – 14 November 2011) was the CEO of Compagnie Générale des Eaux, (currently known as Vivendi, a French company part of the CAC 40) from 1976 to 1995.Guy Dejouany was a French businessman, former president of the French group Générale des Eaux from 1976 to 1996, and one of the most emblematic leaders in the period 1970-2000 France.
He had been nicknamed the Sphinx, or The Duke of Anjou (the headquarters of CGE being on the street of Anjou in Paris).
Guy Dejouany worked as chief executive officer of Vinci PLC from 1990 to 1996. He was the honorary chairman of Vivendi Universal.
He played an important role in Vinci PLC's supervisory board as chairman from 1988 to 1990. He was the director of Vivendi Universal Publishing, and served as a member of the supervisory boards of Dalkia and Compagnie des Eaux et de l'Ozone. He was a permanent representative of Vivendi Universal on the board of directors of UGC, as well as the part-owner and director of Alcatel-Lucent. He was also a member of the councils D E monitoring of Dalkia and of the Ozone and Water-company.
He graduated from École Polytechnique and École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées.

Robert Lynen (24 May 1920 in Nermier, France – 1 April 1944 in Karlsruhe, Germany) was a French actor. A child star of French cinema, he joined the French Resistance during his country's occupation during World War II, was arrested and deported to Germany, and shot by a Nazi firing squad after repeated escape attempts.

Henri Jacques Daniel Paul François (16 May 1920 – 25 November 2003), known as Jacques François was a French actor. During a sixty-year career (1942–2002) he appeared in more than 120 films and over 30 stage productions. In 1948 he went to Hollywood with a view to playing the lead in Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948) but the part went to Louis Jourdan. After appearing alongside Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as the playwright Jacques Pierre Barredout in The Barkleys of Broadway (1949) he returned to France.François regularly dubbed Gregory Peck into French.
During World War II, he served as a captain in the French First Army under General de Lattre.

Jean Desailly (24 August 1920 – 11 June 2008) was a French actor. He was a member of the Comédie-Française from 1942 to 1946, and later participated in about 90 movies.

Pierre Louki, born Pierre Varenne on 25 July 1920 in Brienon-sur-Armançon in Yonne, died 21 December 2006, was a French actor and singer/songwriter.
Louki was the son of Georges Varenne, a teacher in the Yonne who was killed in Auschwitz. He learnt the theatre in Auxerre before going to Paris in the early 1950s, where he met Roger Blin and Jean-Louis Barrault. He subsequently played in Blin's production of En attendant Godot. He also began song-writing at this time.
Among the interpreters of Louki's more than 200 chansons (besides himself) were Lucette Raillat, Catherine Sauvage, Francesca Solleville, Isabelle Aubret, Les Frères Jacques, Juliette Gréco, Jean Ferrat, Philippe Clay, Colette Renard, Annie Cordy and Georges Brassens. He toured with the latter and wrote a book of recollections entitled Avec Brassens (éditions Christian Pirot, 1999, ISBN 2-86808-129-0).
He received the Académie Charles Cros prize in 1972, and in 1999, the SACEM André-Didier Mauprey prize.
Pierre Louki also appeared as stage author and actor and broadcast on France-Culture, while on television he took part in programmes of Jean-Christophe Averty.
He wrote several books for children and his memoirs are Quelques confidences (éditions Christian Pirot, septembre 2006).

Jean-Joël Barbier (25 March 1920 – 31 May or 1 June 1994) was a French writer, musicologist and pianist.Born in Belfort, Barbier began studying literature and music with Blanche Selva and Lazare Lévy but was interrupted by the onset of World War II.He was a reasonably prolific writer in France, publishing A Dictionary of French Musicians in 1961 and collaborating with La Revue Musicale on a frequent basis. As a pianist, he played mostly the works of French composers such as Claude Debussy, Emmanuel Chabrier and Déodat de Séverac. He later recorded the complete piano works of Erik Satie, which he is most known for today.He died in the 14th arrondissement of Paris.

Jules Vuillemin (; French: [vɥijmɛ̃]; 15 February 1920 – 16 January 2001) was a French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy of Knowledge at the prestigious Collège de France, in Paris, from 1962 to 1990, succeeding Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Professor emeritus from 1991 to 2001. He was an Invited Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey (1968).
At the Collège de France, Vuillemin introduced analytical philosophy to France. Vuillemin’s thought had a major influence on Jacques Bouveresse's works. Vuillemin himself vindicated the legacy of Martial Gueroult.
A friend of Michel Foucault, he supported his election at the Collège de France, and was also close to Michel Serres.

Georges Balandier (21 December 1920 – 5 October 2016) was a French sociologist, anthropologist and ethnologist noted for his research in Sub-Saharan Africa. Balandier was born in Aillevillers-et-Lyaumont. He was a professor at the Sorbonne (Université René Descartes, Paris-V), and is a member of the Center for African Studies (Centre d'études africaines [Ceaf]), a research center of the École pratique des hautes études (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences). He held for many years the Editorship of Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie (previously held by his mentor Georges Gurvitch) and edited the series Sociologie d'Aujourd'hui at Presses Universitaires de France. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1976. He died on 5 October 2016 at the age of 95.

Paul John Wonner (April 24, 1920 – April 23, 2008) was an American artist best known for his still-life paintings done in an abstract expressionist style.
Born in Tucson, Arizona, he received a B.A. in 1952, an M.A. in 1953, and an M.L.S. in 1955―all from the University of California, Berkeley. He rose to prominence in the 1950s as an abstract expressionist associated with the Bay Area Figurative Movement, along with his partner, Theophilus Brown, whom he met in 1952 while attending graduate school. In 1956, Wonner started painting a series of dreamlike male bathers and boys with bouquets. In 1962, he began teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles. By the end of the 1960s, he had abandoned his loose figurative style and focused exclusively on still lifes in a hyperrealist style. Wonner died April 23, 2008, in San Francisco, California.