1909 births

Ernesto Calindri (5 February 1909 – 9 June 1999) was an Italian theater and film actor. He appeared in 40 films between 1938 and 1989. He is often remembered in Italy for a series of TV commercials for a well-known brand of Italian artichoke-based bitter liqueur, Cynar, with the catchphrase "Contro il logorio della vita moderna" ("Assuaging the wear-and-tear of modern life") which showed him sitting at a café table surrounded by traffic drinking and reading the paper in relaxed fashion.

Randi Heide Steen (15 December 1909 – 12 November 1990) was a Norwegian soprano singer.

Manuel Ortega Juárez (9 July 1909 – 24 February 1973) was a Spanish flamenco cantaor (singer).

Niels Onstad (26 March 1909 – 17 June 1978) was a Norwegian shipowner and art collector.

Marguerite Catherine Perey (19 October 1909 – 13 May 1975) was a French physicist and a student of Marie Curie. In 1939, Perey discovered the element francium by purifying samples of lanthanum that contained actinium. In 1962, she was the first woman to be elected to the French Académie des Sciences, an honor denied to her mentor Curie. Perey died of cancer in 1975.

Carlos Luis Fallas Sibaja (January 21, 1909 – May 7, 1966), also known as Calufa (from the initial syllables of his first, middle and last name), was a Costa Rican author and communist political activist.
Born in Alajuela to a single mother, Fallas completed only the first two years of secondary schooling before moving to Limón, on the Atlantic coast, where he worked in the banana plantations of the United Fruit Company. Finding conditions there intolerable, he returned to Alajuela at the age of 22 and found work as a shoemaker.
Fallas became active in the organized labor movement and in the Communist Party of Costa Rica. After a bloody clash between striking workers and the police, a judge sentenced him in 1933 one year of banishment in the Atlantic coast. There, Fallas became the leader of the 15,000-strong banana workers' strike of 1934. In 1942, Fallas was elected city council representative and in 1944 he became a national congressman. He fought in the Costa Rican Civil War of 1948 on the side of the government forces, to which the communists were then allied.
As an author he is best known for his novels Mamita Yunai (1940), which denounced the harsh condition endured by workers for the United Fruit Company and which is referenced in Pablo Neruda's Canto General, and for Marcos Ramírez (1952), a humorous bildungsroman about the life of a Costa Rican boy in the early 20th century, taken largely from Fallas's own life. Other works include Gentes y gentecillas (1947), and Mi madrina (1954).
Despite his brief formal schooling and relatively meager output, Fallas is one of the most widely read Costa Rican authors. In 1962 he was awarded the William Faulkner Foundation's Ibero-American Novel Prize for Marcos Ramírez. He received the Magón Prize, Costa Rica's highest recognition for cultural work, shortly before his death from kidney cancer at the age of 57. The Costa Rican Congress posthumously declared him Benemérito de la Patria ("Deserving Citizen," the highest distinction that the government can extend) in 1977.
Fallas is a descendent of Ana Cardosa, an enslaved woman from Cartago.

Joaquín Gallegos Lara (April 9, 1909 – November 16, 1947) was an Ecuadorian social realist novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayist.

Domingo Marrero Navarro (1909–1960) was a Puerto Rican educator, writer, and speaker.

Lucien Servanty (born in 1909 in Paris, died 7 October 1973 in Toulouse) was a French aeronautical engineer. A graduate from the Ecole des Arts et Métiers, he joined Breguet in 1937, then worked at the SNCASO, where he was involved in the redesign of late variants of the Bloch MB.150 line. During World War II, he designed the SO.6000 Triton, France's first jet aircraft. But Lucien Servanty is probably best remembered today for being one of the main engineers behind Concorde (fastest general, public usage plane ever produced).

Charles Pozzi (27 August 1909 – 28 February 2001) was a French racing driver who participated in one World Championship Formula One race in 1950, the year of its inception.