* 1961 – Rory Bremner, Scottish comedian

* 1961 – The Russian ( Soviet ) cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human to travel into outer space and perform the first manned orbital flight, in Vostok 3KA-2 ( Vostok 1 ).

* 1961 – Enedina Arellano Félix, Mexican drug trafficker

* 1961 – Lisa Gerrard, Australian singer, musician, and composer ( Dead Can Dance )

* 1961 – Charles Mann, American football player

* 1961 – Magda Szubanski, Australian actress

* 1961 – K-19, the first Soviet nuclear submarine equipped with nuclear missiles, is commissioned.

* 1961 – Isiah Thomas, American basketball player

* 1961 – Yolanda Adams, American singer, producer, and actress

* 1961 – Tom Ford, American fashion designer and director

* 1961 – Helmut Winklhofer, German footballer

* 1881 – Leo Carrillo, American actor ( d. 1961 )

* 1961 – Brad Gilbert, American tennis player

* 1961 – John Key, New Zealand politician, 38th Prime Minister of New Zealand

* 1961 – Amy Stiller, American comedian and actress

* 1961 – East Germany closes the border between the eastern and western sectors of Berlin to thwart its inhabitants ' attempts to escape to the West.

* 1961 – Sam Champion, American weatherman

* 1961 – Christos Christodoulou, Greek basketball player

* 1961 – Dawnn Lewis, American actress

* 1961 – Stuart Maconie, English journalist, author, and broadcaster

* 1961 – Neil Mallender, England cricketer

* 1961 – Tom Perrotta, American novelist

* 1961 – Sunil Shetty, Indian actor and producer

* 1961 – Cary Stayner, American serial killer

* 1886 – John Alexander Douglas McCurdy Canadian pilot and engineer ( d. 1961 )

But watching Mrs. Cyril Ring, Berniece Dalton Janssen, Mrs. Robert Jarvis, Mrs. Walter Adams order low-calorie seafood, no bread, I could see the Ziegfeld Girls of 1920 were determined to be glamorous grandmothers of 1961.

Editor's note: Sir Robert Watson-Watt wrote, on page 50 of SR Research for 4 March 1961::

* 1961 – Robert Carlyle, British actor

The process – carried out partly at “ revolutionary universities ” and partly within prisons – was investigated and reported upon by Robert Jay Lifton, then Research Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University: see Lifton ( 1961 ).

Although much of his legal reform proposals were not established in his life time, his legal legacy was considered by the magazine New Scientist, in a publication of 1961, as having influenced the drafting of the Code Napoleon, and the law reforms introduced by Sir Robert Peel.

Author Robert A. Heinlein coined the term in his best-selling 1961 book Stranger in a Strange Land.

Robert A. Heinlein originally coined the term grok in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land as a Martian word that could not be defined in Earthling terms, but can be associated with various literal meanings such as " water ", " to drink ", " life ", or " to live ", and had a much more profound figurative meaning that is hard for terrestrial culture to understand because of its assumption of a singular reality.

The Innocents ( Jack Clayton, 1961 ) based on the Henry James novel The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting ( Robert Wise, 1963 ) are two such horror-of-the-demonic films from the early 1960s, both made in the UK by American studios.

* 1961 – Robert Wexler, American politician

* 1961: La Belle Américaine, directed by Robert Dhéry

Lawrencium was first synthesized by the nuclear-physics team of Albert Ghiorso, Torbjørn Sikkeland, Almon Larsh, Robert M. Latimer, and their co-workers on February 14, 1961, at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory ( now called the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ) at the University of California.

In 1961 American experimenters Robert Biard and Gary Pittman, working at Texas Instruments, found that GaAs emitted infrared radiation when electric current was applied and received the patent for the infrared LED.

* The Great Ideas Today ( 1961 – 1977, 17 volumes ), with Robert Hutchins, 1978 – 1999, 20 volumes

* 1897 – Robert E. Gross, American businessman ( d. 1961 )

* 1961 – Robert Stethem, American murder victim ( d. 1985 )

* Heilbroner, Robert L. 1961.

* Samuel C. Patterson and Robert S. Walker, " The Political Attitudes of Oklahoma Newspapers Editors: The Prohibition Issue ," The Southwestern Social Science Quarterly ( 1961 )

* Robert Morris ( born 1961 ), founding pastor of Gateway Church in Texas

* Brower, Robert H., and Earl Miner, Japanese Court Poetry, Stanford University Press, 1961.

In 1961, the Redskins moved into their new stadium called D. C. Stadium ( changed to Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in 1969 ).

The play spawned an innovative 1961 musical film of the same name, directed by Robert Wise and Robbins, starring Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, Rita Moreno, George Chakiris and Russ Tamblyn.

* Robert A. Heinlein repeatedly used Martians ( usually, human beings born and bred on Mars ) as characters in his novels and short stories, including Red Planet ( 1949 ), Double Star ( 1956 ), and Stranger in a Strange Land ( 1961 ).

In the fall of 1961, SNCC organizer Robert Moses began the first such project in McComb and the surrounding counties in the Southwest corner of the state.

His brother Courtlandt S. Gross was a co-founder and executive, succeeding Robert as Chairman following his death in 1961.