1897 births

António Botto (Concavada, Portugal, August 17, 1897 – Rio de Janeiro, March 16, 1959) was a Portuguese aesthete and lyricist poet.

André Couder (27 November 1897 – 16 January 1979) was a French optician and astronomer.

Fernand Ledoux (born Jacques Joseph Félix Fernand Ledoux, 24 January 1897, Tirlemont – 21 September 1993, Villerville) was a French film and theatre actor of Belgian origin. He studied with Raphaël Duflos at the CNSAD, and began his career with small roles at the Comédie-Française. He appeared in close to eighty films, with his best remembered role being the stationmaster Roubaud in Jean Renoir's La Bête humaine (1938), but he remained primarily a theatrical actor for the duration of his career.
Married to Fernande Thabuy, with whom he had four children, Ledoux was an amateur painter, and lived for many years at Pennedepie in Normandy. Later he moved to Villerville, where he died and where he is buried.

Maria Valtorta (14 March 1897 – 12 October 1961) was a Catholic Italian writer. She was a Franciscan tertiary and a lay member of the Servants of Mary who reported personal conversations with, and dictations from, Jesus Christ. She lived much of her life bedridden in Viareggio in Tuscany where she died in 1961. She is buried at the grand cloister of the Basilica of Santissima Annunziata in Florence.She is best known for her 5,000 page book The Poem of the Man-God, first published in 1956 and later titled The Gospel as Revealed to Me. The book is based on 10,000 of the 15,000 pages in her handwritten notebooks. The 10,000 pages were mostly written from 1944-1947 and detail the life of Jesus as an extended narrative of the gospels. These handwritten pages were typed on separate pages by her spiritual advisor, Father Romualdo Migliorini, O.S.M, and chronologically reassembled into a book. The additional 5,000 pages were later published as separate books.Her main book was placed on the (now abolished) Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1959, and has remained controversial since its publication. Various Biblical experts, historians and scientists continue to support and criticize the book to this day, and yearly conferences on the scientific and theological aspects of her writings are held in Italy.

Tina Lattanzi (born Annunziata Concetta Costantini; 5 December 1897 – 25 October 1997) was an Italian actress and voice actress.

Charles Anthoine Gonnet (November 3, 1897 – September 26, 1985) was a French poet. He was born in Laon. In 1924 he won a bronze medal in the art competitions of the Olympic Games for his "Vers le Dieu d'Olympie" ("Face to Face with Olympia's God").

Sir Isaac Wolfson, 1st Baronet FRS (; 17 September 1897 – 20 June 1991) was a Scottish businessman and philanthropist. He was managing director of Great Universal Stores (G.U.S. or Gussies) 1932–1947 and chairman 1947–1987. He established the Wolfson Foundation to distribute most of his fortune to good causes. Great Universal Stores was a mail order business. He joined the company as a merchandising controller in 1932, becoming joint managing director in the same year. The company was in trouble when he joined but he turned it round and made it into a very strong business and the principal source of his wealth. He also had other successful business ventures. He was succeeded by his son Leonard Wolfson.

Joë Bousquet (French: [buskɛ]; 19 March 1897 – 28 September 1950) was a French poet.
Bousquet was born in Narbonne. Wounded on 27 May 1918 at Vailly near the Aisne battlelines at the end of the First World War, he was paralysed for the rest of his life, and lived a life largely bedridden, surrounded by his books. His physical incapacity and constant pain (for which he took opium) caused a retreat from the world, but also became the starting point for an extensive body of poetry and writing. He contributed poetry to the Carcassonne poetic review Cahiers du Sud, and carried on a correspondence with many writers and friends, including Louis Aragon, André Gide, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, and Simone Weil. He died in Carcassonne, and his home there is now a museum in his memory.
Bousquet became friends with the surrealists, and his poetry is often associated with them. He also purchased paintings by Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Jean Fautrier, Wols, André Masson and Hans Bellmer, and was modeled by René Iché and painted by Jean Dubuffet.
His work was admired by many famous French writers of the 20th century, including René Char, Louis Aragon, André Breton, Maurice Blanchot, André Gide, Paul Valéry, and, most notably, Gilles Deleuze.

Bernard Ferdinand Lyot (27 February 1897 in Paris – 2 April 1952 in Cairo) was a French astronomer.

Marcel André Henri Félix Petiot (17 January 1897 – 25 May 1946) was a French medical doctor and serial killer. He was convicted of multiple murders after the discovery of the remains of 23 people in the basement of his home in Paris during World War II. He is suspected of the murder of about 60 to 200 victims during his lifetime, although the true number remains unknown.Despite showing early signs of mental illness and criminal behaviour, Petiot served in the First World War, graduated from an accelerated medical program, and began a dubious medical career that included performing abortions and supplying narcotics. His political career was marked by scandal, theft, and corruption. During the Second World War, Petiot operated a fraudulent escape network, offering safe passage to those wanted by the Germans for a fee, only to murder them, steal their valuables, and dispose of their bodies. In total, he was suspected of around 60 murders, but the remains of only 23 victims were found in the basement of his Paris home. Captured in 1944, Petiot claimed to be a Resistance hero who killed only the enemies of France. He was convicted of 26 counts of murder and was executed by guillotine in 1946. His life and heinous crimes have been depicted in film and comic books.