List of Famous people who died at 72

Oodgeroo Noonuccal ( UUD-gə-roo NOO-nə-kəl; born Kathleen Jean Mary Ruska, later Kath Walker was an Aboriginal Australian political activist, artist and educator, who campaigned for Aboriginal rights. Noonuccal was best known for her poetry, and was the first Aboriginal Australian to publish a book of verse.

Lt. Gen. Mohamed Lamari was Chief of Staff of the Algerian army during most of the Algerian Civil War.

Raden Ayu Siti Hartinah was the wife of the second Indonesian president, Suharto and former First Lady of Indonesia from 1967 until 1996. She is usually known as Ibu Tien to Indonesians, but is also known as Siti Hartinah Soeharto.

Thorkild Grosbøll was a parish priest in the Church of Denmark. In the early 2000s he received a lot of media attention in Denmark for publicly stating disbelief in an interventionist creator God. He died on 10 May 2020 after a short illness.

John Keith Vernon was a Canadian actor. He made a career in Hollywood after achieving initial television stardom in Canada. He was best known for playing Dean Wormer in Animal House, the Mayor in Dirty Harry and Fletcher in The Outlaw Josey Wales.

Kuo Chin-fa was a Taiwanese singer.

William Tai, known professionally as Malik, was a Belgian comic book artist.

Hubertus Alexander Wolfgang Rüdiger Emanuel Wilhelm Count von Faber-Castell was a German billionaire and industrial heir.

Helmut Käutner was a German film director active mainly in the 1940s and 1950s. He began his career at the end of the Weimar Republic and had released his first major films in Nazi Germany.

Friederike Nadig was a German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). One of the four women members of the Parlamentarischer Rat who drafted the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany in 1948/49, she was one of the Mothers of the Basic Law.