List of Famous people who died at 79

Khosrow Sinai was an Iranian film director, screenwriter, music composer, poet, and scholar.

Mónica Eliana Jiménez de la Jara was a Chilean Christian Democrat politician and Minister of Education.

Timo Mäkinen was one of the original "Flying Finns" of motor rallying. He is most famous for his hat-tricks of wins in the RAC Rally and the 1000 Lakes Rally.

Slamet A. Sjukur was the founding father of contemporary Indonesian music. He studied and worked in Paris under Olivier Messiaen and Henri Dutilleux. He was a lecturer at IKJ but because of his unconventional ideas, he finally had to leave. He had been living in Jakarta and Surabaya as a freelance composer, teacher and music critic. Developing the idea of minimax in music, his compositions are "notable for their minimal constellation of sounds and for their numerological basis which indicate the composer’s interest in a new ‘ecology of music’". This idea views limitation not as obstructions but as a challenge to work with a simple material, maximally.

Oscar Homolka was an Austrian film and theatre actor, who went on to work in Germany, Britain and America. Both his voice and his appearance fitted him for roles as communist spies or Soviet officials, for which he was in regular demand. By the age of 30, he had appeared in more than 400 plays; his film career covered at least 100 films and TV shows.

Lanza del Vasto was an Italian philosopher, poet, artist, Catholic and nonviolent activist.

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Her 1978 novel The Sea, the Sea won the Booker Prize. In 1987, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II for services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Estelle Bernadotte, Countess of Wisborg (1928–1973), also known as Estelle Ekstrand, was an American-Swedish countess who was a leading figure in the International Red Cross and Girl Scout movement. She married Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish member of a United Nations mediating team. He was assassinated by the extremist zionist Stern gang while on duty in Israel in September 1948.

Franciscus ("Frans") Jozef Brüggen was a Dutch conductor, recorder player and baroque flautist.

Boris Sofronovich Kowerda, also known as Koverda, was a White émigré, monarchist, editor, and proofreader convicted of murdering Pyotr Voykov, Soviet ambassador to Poland in 1927 in Warsaw.