1923 births

Maurice Chevit (31 October 1923 – 2 July 2012) was a French actor.Maurice Chevit made his theatrical début just after the Second World War, and made his first screen appearance in 1946 in René Clément's film Le Père tranquille. In August 1950, the Theatre de la Huchette in Paris presented Pepita ou Cinq cents francs de bonheur, a three-act comedy that Chevit co-wrote with Henri Fontenille; Chevit himself appeared in it, playing alongside Jacqueline Maillan, Pierre Mondy and Jacques Jouanneau. He was seen in many small film roles during the 1950s and 1960s, working with producers such as Henri Decoin and André Cayatte, but he was best known as a stage actor.

Claude Parent (26 February 1923 – 27 February 2016), born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, was a French architect.
Architect, polemicist and theoretician, Claude Parent was the first person in France to make a sharp epistemological break with modernism, beginning in the mid 1950s. Through articles, books, magnificent manifesto-drawings and built projects, his work has enabled us to rethink our understanding and evolve our grasp of space. From the Maison Drusch (1963) all the way to his project for the Musée du Prado (1995), he has sought to create discontinuity by shifting and tipping volumes and by fracturing of the plan. Essentially self-taught, he began his career with Ionel Schein, with whom he worked until 1955. He also participated in the Espace group, founded in 1951 by the artists André Bloc and Félix del Marle. The Architecture Principe group (1963–68) was born out of his encounter with Paul Virilio. As was the adventure of the oblique function, their innovation through the continuity of the inclined plane, which led to the construction of the l’Eglise Sainte-Bernadette-du-Banlay in Nevers (1966).
After the 1968 split with Virilio, Claude Parent continued to experiment, develop and build the oblique function into his projects (Claude Parent's own house in Neuilly, painter Andrée Bellaguet's apartment) as well as in temporary installations in several Maisons de la Culture (Culture centers in France in the late 60s). In 1970, he curates and designs the French Pavilion at the 35th Venice Art Biennale, Italy, inviting artists such as Gérard Mannoni, Gilles Ehrmann, Samuel Buri; François Morellet, Andrée Bellaguet, Jean-Pierre Cousin and Charles Maussion. Claude Parent's space design (called "The Line of the Greatest Slope") is the first successful attempt to construct an oblique space. Imagined alone, but elaborated collectively, the French pavilion is considered by Parent as "a collective act [...] a creative action." With this event, Claude Parent transforms the viewer into works of art. This experiment becomes his working material and the reactions, positive as well as negative, will form the basis of the architect's study.Parent also designed several superstores in “béton brut” or “raw concrete” in Ris Orangis (1969) and Sens (1970), among others. In 1974, a few months after the oil crisis, EDF (France's production and distribution power company), Parent, 47, is entrusted with the coordination of a group of architects including, among others Paul Andreu, Jean Willerval and Roger Taillibert. For the next 10 years he leads the group to redesign nuclear power plants and find ways to better integrate them in the landscape. Commissions from the public sector for the French Education Department, the Regional Council of Provence Alpes Côte d’Azur in Marseille (1991), the Charles de Gaulle airport exchange center (1995) and the French Pavilion facade at the Venice Biennale of Architecture (1996) are all expressions of his quest for disequilibrium, movement and fluidity in architecture. Demanding, critical, provocative and fiercely obstinate, Claude Parent has continuously proposed places of contradiction generating doubt and disquiet and excluding any sort of passiveness with regard to architecture.
Though destined for a career as an engineer in the field of aeronautics, Claude Parent enrolled in the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Toulouse in 1943 in the architecture studio, and then in 1946 in the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Paris. He left before obtaining his diploma in architecture, and later founded his own firm in 1956, but was only recognized by and admitted to the Order of Architects in 1966, based on his experience. An Academician, Claude Parent is a Commander of the French Legion of Honor, a Commander of Arts and Letters, Officer of the Palmes Académiques and a Commander of the National Order of Merit. Prizes stand as milestones marking his entire career: National Grand Prize of Architecture (1979), the silver medal of the Academy of Architecture, the medal of the Central Union of the Decorative Arts, the gold medal of the Society for the Encouragement of Progress and the medal of the U.I.A for his work in criticism. In 1994, Architecture critic and curator Fréderic Migayrou celebrates Claude Parent's essential contribution and unique place in post WWII architecture, and many leading architects such as Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, Zaha Hadid recognize him as both a precursor and an influence. In 2010, a retrospective exhibition at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine was dedicated to this major figure in the history of 20th-century architecture.

Charles-Robert Ageron (6 November 1923 – 3 September 2008) was a French historian specializing in colonial Algeria. He was born on 6 November 1923 in Lyon and died on 3 September 2008 in Kremlin-Bicêtre.

Jean Léon Marie Delumeau (18 June 1923 – 13 January 2020) was a French historian specializing in the history of the Catholic Church, and author of several books regarding the subject. He held the Chair of the History of Religious Mentalities (1975–1994) at the Collège de France (former emeritus professor) and was a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres.

Didier Anzieu (French: [ɑ̃zjø]; 8 July 1923 – 25 November 1999) was a distinguished French psychoanalyst.

Father William B. Wasson (December 21, 1923 - August 16, 2006) was an American Catholic priest. He was born in Phoenix, Arizona, United States, but moved to Mexico where he trained as a priest. In 1954, he founded Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos, a charity for orphans and neglected and abandoned children, which today operates across Latin America. Wasson died in August 2006 in Arizona, due to complications arising from a hip injury.

Marshall Wayne See (November 3, 1923 – July 22, 2019) was an American professional basketball player. He played in 1949–50 for the Waterloo Hawks during their only season in the National Basketball Association and scored 320 points for Waterloo. See was the first professional basketball player to come out of Northern Arizona University.

Benjamin Semple Chase III (March 18, 1923 – March 6, 1998) was an American football guard who played one season with the Detroit Lions of the National Football League (NFL). He played college football at the United States Naval Academy and attended Herbert Hoover High School in San Diego, California. He was a consensus All-American in 1944.

Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat (French: [ivɔn ʃɔkɛ bʁy.a] ; born 29 December 1923) is a French mathematician and physicist. She has made seminal contributions to the study of Einstein's general theory of relativity, by showing that the Einstein equations can be put into the form of an initial value problem which is well-posed. In 2015, her breakthrough paper was listed by the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity as one of thirteen 'milestone' results in the study of general relativity, across the hundred years in which it had been studied.She was the first woman to be elected to the French Academy of Sciences and is a Grand Officier of the Légion d'honneur.

Jean Babilée (real name Jean Gutman(n); 3 February 1923 – 30 January 2014) was a prominent French dancer and choreographer of the latter half of the 20th century. He is considered to have been one of modern ballet's greatest performers, and the first French dancer to gain international acclaim. Babilée has been called the "enfant terrible of dance."Born in Paris in 1923, the son of a doctor, Babilée studied at the Paris Opéra Ballet School from 1936 to 1940. His dance career was interrupted during World War II because he was Jewish on his father's side. He left Paris in 1940 when the Wehrmacht was approaching the city, but returned to dance with the Paris Opera Ballet in early 1942. He narrowly escaped being sent to Auschwitz during the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup in Paris on 16 July 1942. In early 1943 he left the city to avoid compulsory deportation to Germany as a forced laborer. He spent the rest of the war with the French Resistance, fighting with the Maquis in Touraine.After the war, Babilée returned to dance, joining the Soirées de la Danse, which later became Les Ballet des Champs Elysées. His birth name was Jean Gutmann, but he adopted his mother's maiden name for professional use. Babilée enjoyed some of his greatest successes as a member of Les Ballets des Champs-Elysées and Les Ballets de Paris. From 1945 to 1950 he was principal dancer of the Ballets des Champs-Élysées, for which he created roles in ballets including Jeu de cartes, Jean Cocteau's Le Jeune Homme et la Mort, L'Amour et son amour, and Till Eulenspiegel. In several of these ballets he performed opposite his wife, featured ballerina Nathalie Philippart. In the 1940s Babilée quickly developed a reputation for his physical prowess. It was said that he could leap better than any dancer since Nijinsky, and in the 1946 premiere of Le Jeune Homme et la Mort he hung by his neck on a gallows for one minute, supported only by wrapping one arm around a pillar.In the 1950s he danced as a guest of Le Ballet de l'Opéra de Paris and the American Ballet Theatre, before forming his own company, Les Ballets Jean Babilée. In 1972 and 1973 he served as director of the Ballet du Rhin in Strasbourg. In the early 1980s, Maurice Béjart created the solo Life for him. In 1984, at the age of 61, he performed Le Jeune Homme et la Mort with the Ballet de Marseille.He also appeared as a stage actor and in several films.The 2000 documentary film Le Mystère Babilée, directed by Patrick Bensard, reconstructs Babilée's career through interviews with the dancer, excerpts from his choreographic work, and recollections by observers and collaborators including Béjart, Christian Lacroix, Jean-Paul Goude and Yvette Chauviré.