List of Famous people who died at 85

Lina Carstens was a German film and theater actress. On stage she appeared in plays by Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, and August Strindberg, and in her old age she starred in the film Lina Braake directed by Bernhard Sinkel.

Godfried Maria Jules Danneels was a Belgian cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as the Metropolitan Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels and the chairman of the episcopal conference of his native country from 1979 to 2010. He was elevated to the cardinalate in 1983. His resignation that he had submitted in 2008 at the age of 75 was accepted by Pope Benedict XVI on 18 January 2010.

Henri Michaux was a highly idiosyncratic Belgian-born poet, writer, and painter who wrote in French. He later took French citizenship. Michaux is best known for his esoteric novels and poems written in an accessible yet erratic and unnerving style. His body of work includes poetry, travelogues, and art criticism. Michaux travelled widely, tried his hand at several careers, and experimented with psychedelic drugs, especially LSD and mescaline, which resulted in two of his most intriguing works, Miserable Miracle and The Major Ordeals of the Mind and the Countless Minor Ones.

Karl Rudolf Werner Best was a German Nazi, jurist, police chief, SS-Obergruppenführer and Nazi Party leader and theoretician from Darmstadt, Hesse. He was the first chief of Department 1 of the Gestapo, Nazi Germany's secret police, and initiated a registry of all Jews in Germany. As a deputy of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, he organized the World War II SS-Einsatzgruppen paramilitary death squads that were responsible for mass killings.

Helmuth Emil Froschauer was an Austrian conductor, especially a choral conductor who received his first training as a member of the Wiener Sängerknaben. He conducted the choir from 1953 to 1965, including 22 international tours. He went on to conduct the choirs of the Wiener Singverein, the Vienna State Opera and the WDR Rundfunkchor Köln. As a close collaborator of Herbert von Karajan from 1989, he prepared choirs for the Salzburg Festival among others.

Colette Renard born Colette Lucie Raget, was a French actress and singer. Renard is closely associated with the titular character from the musical Irma La Douce, a role she played for over a decade.

Benno Müller-Hill was a German biologist and author. Together with Walter Gilbert, Müller-Hill purified the lac repressor, the first genetic control protein to be isolated. Müller-Hill has lectured widely and written books on the misuse of science by the Nazis.

Firuz Kanatlı was a Turkish businessman and founder and honorary president of the well known company Eti.

Carl Ransom Rogers was an American psychologist and among the founders of the humanistic approach in psychology. Rogers is widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of psychotherapy research and was honored for his pioneering research with the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions by the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1956.

Mustafa Abdul Qadir Tlass was a Syrian senior military officer and politician who was Syria's minister of defense from 1972 to 2004. He was part of the four-member Regional Command during the Hafez Assad era.