List of Famous people who died at 78

Meena Shah was a national badminton champion of India. She died on 10 March 2015, at the Sahara Hospital in Lucknow. Shah won the Senior National Badminton Championships for seven years in a row and also won the women's doubles title three times and the mixed doubles crown twice. She was a recipient of the Padma Shri and the Arjuna award.

John Mervyn Addison was a British composer best known for his film scores.

Suzette Haden Elgin was an American researcher in experimental linguistics, construction and evolution of languages and poetry and science fiction writer. She founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association and is considered an important figure in the field of science fiction constructed languages. Her best-known non-fiction includes her Verbal Self-Defense series.

Jimmy Fontana was an Italian actor, composer and singer-songwriter. Two of his most famous songs are "Che sarà", performed also by José Feliciano with Ricchi e Poveri and "Il Mondo".

Lenore Ulric was a star of the Broadway stage and Hollywood films of the silent-film and early sound era.

Maxwell Emmett Buttram, professionally known as Pat Buttram, was an American character actor, known for playing the sidekick of Gene Autry and for playing the character of Mr. Haney in the television series Green Acres. He had a distinctive voice that, in his own words, "never quite made it through puberty."

Albert Edward Sutherland was a film director and actor. Born in London, he was from a theatrical family. His father, Al Sutherland, was a theatre manager and producer and his mother, Julie Ring, was a vaudeville performer. He was a nephew of both Blanche Ring and Thomas Meighan, who was married to Frances Ring, another of his mother's sisters.

Pierre Bertaux was a noted French resistance fighter and scholar of German literature. While holding administrative positions, he also wrote on Friedrich Hölderlin. He participated in the French resistance in Toulouse, where he imposed Charles De Gaulle's authority during the liberation of France. After the war he was a high-ranking police officer.