List of Famous people who died at 81

George Roy Hill was an American film director. He is most noted for directing such films as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973), both starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford.

John Nicholas Calley was an American film studio executive and producer. He was quite influential during his years at Warner Bros., where he worked from 1968 to 1981, and "produced a film a month, on average, including commercial successes like The Exorcist and Superman." During his seven years at Sony Pictures starting in 1996, five of which he was chairman and chief executive, he was credited with "reinvigorat[ing]" that major film studio.

Gustaw Herling-Grudziński was a Polish writer, journalist, essayist, World War II underground fighter, and political dissident abroad during the communist system in Poland. He is best known for writing a personal account of life in the Soviet Gulag entitled A World Apart, first published in 1951 in London.

Christopher Sandford (1902-1983) of Eye Manor, Herefordshire, was a book designer, proprietor of the Golden Cockerel Press, a founding director of the Folio Society, and husband of the wood engraver and pioneer Corn dolly revivalist, Lettice Sandford, née Mackintosh Rate. During the war he organised preparations for underground resistance from Eye Manor in the event of a Nazi invasion.

James Stephan Rossant was an American architect, artist, and professor of architecture.