List of Famous people who died at 81

Mahdi Elmandjra was a Moroccan futurologist, economist and sociologist.

José María Gil-Robles y Quiñones de León was a Spanish politician, leader of the CEDA and a prominent figure in the period leading up to the Spanish Civil War. He served as Minister of War from May to December 1935. In the 1936 elections the CEDA was defeated, and support for Gil-Robles and his party evaporated. As Civil War approached, Gil-Robles was unwilling to struggle with Francisco Franco for power and in April 1937 he announced the dissolution of CEDA, and went into exile. Abroad, he negotiated with Spanish monarchists to try to arrive at a common strategy for taking power in Spain. In 1968 he was named a professor of the University of Oviedo and published his book No fue posible la paz . He was a member of the International Tribunal at the Hague. After the death of Franco and the end of his regime, Gil-Robles became one of the leaders of the "Spanish Christian Democracy" party, which however failed to win support in the Spanish general elections in 1977.

Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner was a German-British art historian and architectural historian best known for his monumental 46-volume series of county-by-county guides, The Buildings of England (1951–74).

Alexander Altmann was an Orthodox Jewish scholar and rabbi born in Kassa, Austria-Hungary. He emigrated to England in 1938 and later settled in the United States, working productively for a decade and a half as a professor within the Philosophy Department at Brandeis University. He is best known for his studies of the thought of Moses Mendelssohn, and was indeed the leading Mendelssohn scholar since the time of Mendelssohn himself. He also made important contributions to the study of Jewish mysticism, and for a large part of his career he was the only scholar in the United States working on this subject in a purely academic setting. Among the many Brandeis students whose work he supervised in this area were Elliot Wolfson, Arthur Green, Heidi Ravven, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Lawrence Fine, and Daniel Matt.

Veikko Heinonen was a Finnish former ski jumper who competed in the 1950s, winning a silver medal at the 1954 FIS Nordic World Ski Championships on the large hill in Falun.

Mete Akyol was a Turkish journalist.

David Nthubu Koloane was a South African artist. In his drawings, paintings and collages he explored questions about political injustice and human rights. Koloane is considered to have been "an influential artist and writer of the apartheid years" in South Africa.

Reinhard Kolldehoff was a German film actor. He appeared in 140 films between 1941 and 1988. He was born and died in Berlin, Germany.

Philip Toll Hill Jr. was an American automobile racer and the only American-born driver to win the Formula One World Drivers' Championship. He also scored three wins at each of the 24 Hours of Le Mans and 12 Hours of Sebring sports car races.

Robert Jungk was an Austrian writer and journalist who wrote mostly on issues relating to nuclear weapons.