List of Famous people who died at 85

Kazimierz Klaudiusz Górski was a coach of Poland national football team and honorary president of Polish Football Union. He was also a football player, capped once for Poland.

Leslie Aaron Fiedler was an American literary critic, known for his interest in mythography and his championing of genre fiction. His work incorporates the application of psychological theories to American literature. Fiedler's most renowned work consists of Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). A retrospective article on Leslie Fiedler in the New York Times Book Review in 1965 referred to Love and Death in the American Novel as "one of the great, essential books on the American imagination. .. an accepted major work." This groundbreaking work views in depth both American literature and character from the time of the American Revolution to the present. From it, there emerges Fiedler's once scandalous—now increasingly accepted—judgement that our literature is incapable of dealing with adult sexuality and is pathologically obsessed with death.

Our great novelists, though experts on indignity and assault, on loneliness and terror, tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and a woman, which we expect at the center of a novel. Indeed, they rather shy away from permitting in their fictions the presence of any full-fledged, mature women, giving us instead monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality.

Paul Carell was a writer and German propagandist. During the Nazi era, Schmidt served as the chief press spokesman for Joachim von Ribbentrop's Foreign Ministry. In this capacity during World War II, he maintained close ties with the Wehrmacht, while he served in the Allgemeine-SS. One of his specialities was the "Jewish question". After the war, Carell became a successful author, although some critics have claimed that his books romanticized and whitewashed the Wehrmacht.

Fritz Gallati was a Swiss racing cyclist. He rode in the 1961 Tour de France.

Brigadier General Óscar Humberto Mejía Víctores was the 27th President of Guatemala from 8 August 1983 to 14 January 1986. A member of the military, he was president during the apex of repression and death squad activity in the Central American nation. When he was minister of defense, he rallied a coup against President José Efraín Ríos Montt, which he justified by declaring that the government was being abused by religious fanatics. He allowed for a return to democracy, with elections for a constituent assembly in 1984 followed by general elections in 1985.

Max Pfister was a Swiss Romance studies scholar and linguist.

Bustanil Arifin was an Indonesian politician. He once held the posts of Head of the Logistics Department and Minister of Cooperation in Indonesia. He was married to R.A. Suhardani.

Arnold Fanck was a German film director and pioneer of the mountain film genre. He is best known for the extraordinary alpine footage he captured in such films as The Holy Mountain (1926), The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929), Storm over Mont Blanc (1930), The White Ecstasy (1931), and S.O.S. Eisberg (1933). Fanck was also instrumental in launching the careers of several filmmakers during the Weimar years in Germany, including Leni Riefenstahl, Luis Trenker, and cinematographers Sepp Allgeier, Richard Angst, Hans Schneeberger, and Walter Riml.

Betsy Blair was an American actress of film and stage, long based in London.

Patrick van Rensburg was a South African-born anti-apartheid activist and educator. In the 1960s he founded Swaneng Hill School in Serowe, Botswana, and the nationwide Brigades Movement in that country. In the 1980s he founded the Mmegi national newspaper and the Foundation for Education with Production, which promoted his ideas in South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe. In 1981, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award "for developing replicable educational models for the third world majority".