List of Famous people who died at 84
Carl Kasell
Carl Ray Kasell was an American radio personality. He was best known as a newscaster for National Public Radio, and later as the official judge and scorekeeper of the weekly news quiz show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! until his retirement in 2014.
René Bousquet
René Bousquet was a high-ranking French political appointee who served as secretary general to the Vichy regime police from May 1942 to 31 December 1943. For personal heroism, he had become a protégé of prominent officials before the war and rose rapidly in the government.
Ben Hogan
William Ben Hogan was an American professional golfer who is generally considered to be one of the greatest players in the history of the game. He is notable for his profound influence on golf swing theory and his legendary ball-striking ability.
Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen
Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen was a Portuguese poet and writer. Her remains have been entombed in the National Pantheon since 2014.
Vidal Sassoon
Vidal Sassoon was a British hairstylist, businessman, and philanthropist. He was noted for repopularising a simple, close-cut geometric hair style called the bob cut, worn by famous fashion designers including Mary Quant and film stars such as Mia Farrow, Goldie Hawn, Cameron Diaz, Nastassja Kinski and Helen Mirren.
Butterfly McQueen
Butterfly McQueen was an American actress. Originally a dancer, McQueen first appeared in film in 1939 as Prissy in Gone with the Wind. She was unable to attend the movie's premiere because it was held at a whites-only theater. Often typecast as a maid, she said: "I didn't mind playing a maid the first time, because I thought that was how you got into the business. But after I did the same thing over and over, I resented it. I didn't mind being funny, but I didn't like being stupid." She continued as an actress in film in the 1940s, and then moved to television acting in the 1950s. She won a 1980 Daytime Emmy Award for her performance in the ABC Afterschool Special.
Stanisław Lem
Stanisław Herman Lem was a Polish writer of science fiction and essays on various subjects, including philosophy, futurology, and literary criticism. Many of his science fiction stories are of satirical and humorous character. Lem's books have been translated into over 40 languages and have sold over 45 million copies. Worldwide, he is best known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science fiction writer in the world. Lem's science fiction works explore philosophical themes through speculations on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of communication with and understanding of alien intelligence, despair about human limitations, and humanity's place in the Universe. His essays and philosophical books cover these and many other topics.
David J. Thouless
David James Thouless was a British condensed-matter physicist. He was the winner of the 1990 Wolf Prize and a laureate of the 2016 Nobel Prize for physics along with F. Duncan M. Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter.
Hans von Borsody
Hans von Borsody was a German film actor.
Robert Galbraith Heath
Robert Galbraith Heath was an American psychiatrist. He followed the theory of biological psychiatry that organic defects were the sole source of mental illness, and that consequently mental problems were treatable by physical means. He published 425 papers and three books. One of his first papers is dated 1946.