List of Famous people who died at 78

Masao Komatsu was a Japanese actor and comedian.

Jackie Shane was an American soul and rhythm and blues singer, who was most prominent in the local music scene of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in the 1960s. Considered to be a pioneer transgender performer, she was a contributor to the Toronto Sound and is best known for the single Any Other Way, which was a regional Top 10 hit in Toronto in 1962 and a modest national chart hit across Canada in 1967.

Richard Anthony Allen was an American professional baseball player. During his 15-season Major League Baseball (MLB) career, he appeared primarily as a first baseman, third baseman, and outfielder, most notably for the Philadelphia Phillies and Chicago White Sox, and is ranked among baseball's top offensive producers of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Mary Welsh Hemingway was an American journalist and author, who was the fourth wife and widow of Ernest Hemingway.

Carol Ann Doda was a topless dancer in San Francisco, California, who was active from the 1960s through the 1980s. She was the first public topless dancer.

Susumu Nishibe was a Japanese critic, conservative and economist. He was a professor of Socioeconomics at University of Tokyo. He criticized modern economics, progressivism and rationalism, and advocated theories on mass society, conservatism, and the independence of Japan from the United States.

Jiro Horikoshi was the chief engineer of many Japanese fighter designs of World War II, including the Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter.

Charles Boyer was a French-American actor who appeared in more than 80 films between 1920 and 1976. After receiving an education in drama, Boyer started on the stage, but he found his success in American films during the 1930s. His memorable performances were among the era's most highly praised, in romantic dramas such as The Garden of Allah (1936), Algiers (1938), and Love Affair (1939), as well as the mystery-thriller Gaslight (1944). He received four Oscar nominations for Best Actor.

Robert Charles Sproul was an American Reformed theologian and ordained pastor in the Presbyterian Church in America. He was the founder and chairman of Ligonier Ministries and could be heard daily on the Renewing Your Mind radio broadcast in the United States and internationally. Under Sproul's direction, Ligonier Ministries produced the Ligonier Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, which would eventually grow into the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, of which Sproul, alongside Norman Geisler, was one of the chief architects. Sproul has been described as "the greatest and most influential proponent of the recovery of Reformed theology in the last century."

Igor Fedorovich Kostin was one of the five photographers in the world to take pictures of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster near Pripyat in Ukraine, on 26 April 1986. He was working for Novosti Press Agency (APN) as a photographer in Kyiv, Ukraine, when he represented Novosti to cover the nuclear accident in Chernobyl. Kostin's aerial view of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was widely published around the world, showing the extent of the devastation, and triggering fear throughout the world of radioactivity contamination the accident caused, when the Soviet media was working to censor information regarding the accident, releasing limited information regarding the accident on 28 April 1986, until the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991.