List of Famous people who died at 79

Sir Ewan Forbes of Craigievar, 11th Baronet was a Scottish nobleman, general practitioner and farmer. Due to the presence of an intersex condition at birth, he was christened Elizabeth Forbes-Sempill, and officially registered as the youngest daughter of John, Lord Sempill. After an uncomfortable upbringing, he began living as a man at the start of his medical career in 1945. He formally re-registered his birth as male in 1952, adopting the name of "Ewan Forbes-Sempill", and was married a month later.

Tibor Gallai was a Hungarian mathematician. He worked in combinatorics, especially in graph theory, and was a lifelong friend and collaborator of Paul Erdős. He was a student of Dénes Kőnig and an advisor of László Lovász. He was a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1991).

Suna Kıraç was a Turkish businesswoman and a billionaire.

Joseph Lee Galloway was an American newspaper correspondent and columnist. During the Vietnam War, he often worked alongside the American troops he covered and was awarded a Bronze Star Medal in 1998, for having carried a badly wounded man to safety while he was under very heavy enemy fire in 1965.. From 2013 until his death, he worked as a special consultant for the Vietnam War 50th anniversary Commemoration project run out of the Office of the Secretary of Defense and has also served as consultant to Ken Burns' production of a documentary history of the Vietnam War broadcast in the fall of 2017 by PBS. He was also the former Military Affairs consultant for the Knight-Ridder chain of newspapers and was a columnist with McClatchy Newspapers.

Gloria Rose "Barbara" Turner was an American screenwriter and actress. One of her daughters is the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh.

Ng Chiau-tong was a Taiwanese pro-independence activist who served as the chairman of the World United Formosans for Independence (WUFI) until his death in 2011.

Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson (August 26, 1936 – December 13, 2015) was a Chinese-born Anglo-Irish political scientist and historian who lived and taught in the United States. Anderson is best known for his 1983 book Imagined Communities, which explored the origins of nationalism. A polyglot with an interest in southeast Asia, he was the Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor Emeritus of International Studies, Government & Asian Studies at Cornell University. His work on the "Cornell Paper", which debunked the official story of Indonesia's 30 September Movement and the subsequent anti-Communist purges of 1965–1966, led to his expulsion from that country. Benedict Anderson was the elder brother of the historian Perry Anderson.

Richard David Briers, was an English actor. His fifty-year career encompassed television, stage, film and radio.

Carolee Schneemann was an American visual experimental artist, known for her multi-media works on the body, narrative, sexuality and gender. She received a B.A. in poetry and philosophy from Bard College and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois. Originally a painter in the Abstract Expressionist tradition, Schneeman was uninterested in the masculine heroism of New York painters of the time and turned to performance-based work, primarily characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the individual in relation to social bodies. Although renowned for her work in performance and other media, Schneemann began her career as a painter, stating, "I'm a painter. I'm still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas." Her works have been shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the London National Film Theatre, and many other venues.

Frank Gordon Dobson was a British Labour Party politician. As Member of Parliament (MP) for Holborn and St. Pancras from 1979 to 2015, he served in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Health from 1997 to 1999, and was official Labour Party candidate for Mayor of London in 2000, though finishing third in the election behind Conservative Steven Norris and the winner, Labour-turned-Independent Ken Livingstone. Dobson stood down at the 2015 general election.