List of Famous people who died at 81

Engin Cezzar was a Turkish director, and stage, movie and TV actor.

Rudolf Edlinger was a Social Democratic Party of Austria politician who served as Austrian Finance Minister (1997–2000) under Chancellor Viktor Klima. He was the president of the football club SK Rapid Wien between 2001 and 2013.

Teresa Ha is a former Chinese television and film actress from Hong Kong.

Christiane Legrand was a French soprano.

Eduardo Alejo Pavlovsky, often nicknamed Tato Pavlovsky, was an Argentine playwright, psychoanalyst, actor and novelist. His best known plays included El señor Galindez in 1973, La muerte de Margueritte Duras, and Potestad.

Arkady Ivani Ter-Tadevosyan, also known by his nom-de-guerre Komandos, was a Soviet and Armenian Major General, a military leader of the Armenian forces during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War and Armenia's former Deputy Minister of Defense. Ter-Tadevosyan is best known as the commander of the operation to capture the town of Shushi on 8-9 May 1992.

Gertrude "Trudy" Belle Elion was an American biochemist and pharmacologist, who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with George H. Hitchings and Sir James Black for their use of innovative methods of rational drug design for the development of new drugs. This new method focused on understanding the target of the drug rather than simply using trial-and-error. Her work led to the creation of the AIDS drug AZT. Her well known works also include the development of the first immunosuppressive drug, azathioprine, used to fight rejection in organ transplants, and the first successful antiviral drug, acyclovir (ACV), used in the treatment of herpes infection.

Gerald B. "Jerry" Greenberg was an American film editor with more than 40 feature film credits. Greenberg received both the Academy Award for Best Film Editing and the BAFTA Award for Best Editing for the film The French Connection (1971). In the 1980s, he edited five films with director Brian De Palma.

Erdoğan Teziç was a Turkish academic in constitutional law.

Pertti Kullervo Paasio was a Finnish politician from the Social Democratic Party. He was born in Helsinki.