List of Famous people who died at 78

Charles Jerome Daly was an American basketball head coach. He led the Detroit Pistons to two consecutive National Basketball Association (NBA) championships in 1989 and 1990, and the 1992 United States men's Olympic basketball team to the gold medal at the 1992 Summer Olympics.

Hamilton Frederick Bohannon, often credited and known professionally simply as Bohannon, was an American percussionist, band leader, songwriter, arranger, and record producer, who was one of the leading figures in 1970s disco music.

Sergey Georgiyevich Lapin was a Soviet apparatchik, newspaper editor and diplomat.

Yanina Boleslavovna Zhejmo was a Soviet actress of Polish origin. Her father was Polish and her mother was Russian. She appeared in more than 30 films between 1925 and 1955.

Ronald Victor Courtenay Bodley, was a British Army officer, author and journalist. Born to English parents in Paris, he lived in France until he was nine, before attending Eton College and then the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. He was commissioned in the King's Royal Rifle Corps and served with them during the First World War. After the war he spent seven years in the Sahara desert, and then travelled through Asia. Bodley wrote several books about his travels. He was considered among the most distinguished British writers on the Sahara, as well as one of the main western sources of information on the South Seas Mandate.

Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) was an American Reformed theologian, ethicist, commentator on politics and public affairs, and professor at Union Theological Seminary for more than 30 years. Niebuhr was one of America's leading public intellectuals for several decades of the 20th century and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. A public theologian, he wrote and spoke frequently about the intersection of religion, politics, and public policy, with his most influential books including Moral Man and Immoral Society and The Nature and Destiny of Man. The latter is ranked number 18 of the top 100 non-fiction books of the twentieth century by Modern Library. Andrew Bacevich labelled Niebuhr's book The Irony of American History "the most important book ever written on U.S. foreign policy." The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. described Niebuhr as "the most influential American theologian of the 20th century" and Time posthumously called Niebuhr "the greatest Protestant theologian in America since Jonathan Edwards."

William Augustus Leonard was an American journalist and television executive who served as President of CBS News from 1979 to 1982.

Eberhard Cohrs was a German comedian and actor. A short man, he was frequently known as "[der] Kleene mit der großen Gusche", a Saxon dialect epithet which loosely translates as "the little guy with the big mouth".

Yvonne Ann Blake was a British-Spanish costume designer. She won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design for the film Nicholas and Alexandra along with Antonio Castillo. She won four Goya Awards and was nominated for BAFTA Awards and the Emmy Awards as well.

András Toma was a Hungarian soldier who was taken prisoner by the Red Army in 1945, then discovered living in a Russian psychiatric hospital in 2000. He was probably the last prisoner of war from the Second World War to be repatriated.