List of Famous people who died at 59

Dennis Christopher George Potter was an English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist. He is best known for his BBC television serials Pennies from Heaven (1978), The Singing Detective (1986), and the BBC television plays Blue Remembered Hills (1979) and Brimstone and Treacle (1976). His television dramas mixed fantasy and reality, the personal and the social, and often used themes and images from popular culture. Potter is widely regarded as one of the most influential and innovative dramatists to have worked in British television.

Hermann Rasch was a German U-boat commander of U-106 in World War II. He was a recipient of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross of Nazi Germany.

Dave Leonard Miller was a record producer and the founder of many budget album record companies. Miller is more familiar to some record buyers and collectors as the notorious Leo Muller who produced many Exploito type records.

Arsenio Rodríguez was a Cuban musician, composer and bandleader. He played the tres, as well as the tumbadora, and he specialized in son, rumba and other Afro-Cuban music styles. In the 1940s and 1950s Rodríguez established the conjunto format and contributed to the development the son montuno, the basic template of modern-day salsa. He claimed to be the true creator of the mambo and was an important as well as a prolific composer who wrote nearly two hundred songs.

Colonel Robert Franklyn "Bob" Overmyer was an American test pilot, naval aviator, aeronautical engineer, physicist, United States Marine Corps officer and USAF/NASA astronaut. Overmyer was selected by the Air Force as an astronaut for its Manned Orbiting Laboratory in 1966. Upon cancellation of this program in 1969, he became a NASA astronaut and served support crew duties for the Apollo program, Skylab program and Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. In 1976, he was assigned to the Space Shuttle program and flew as pilot on STS-5 in 1982 and as commander on STS-51-B in 1985. He was selected as a lead investigator into the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and retired from NASA in 1986. Ten years later, Overmyer died in Duluth, Minnesota while testing the Cirrus VK-30 composite homebuilt aircraft.