List of Famous people who died at 85

Ferdinand Van der Auwera, pseudonym Fernand Auwera is a Belgian writer. His fragile health during his youth and its impact on his life (solitude), had an effect on his first literary work.

Ronald William Prest Drever was a Scottish experimental physicist. He was a professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, co-founded the LIGO project, and was a co-inventor of the Pound–Drever–Hall technique for laser stabilisation, as well as the Hughes–Drever experiment. This work was instrumental in the first detection of gravitational waves in September 2015.

Shozo Shimamoto was a Japanese artist. He was a co-founder of the avant garde Gutai group formed in the 1950s, and his works are in museum collections such as those of the Tate Gallery and the Tate Modern and the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art in Kobe, Japan. New York Times art critic Roberta Smith has noted him as one of the most daring and independent experimentalists of the postwar international art scene in the 1950s. Internationally today he is especially noted for his work in the "mail art" genre, of which he was a pioneer. In 1997 his mail art works were shown in the solo exhibition "Shozo Shimamoto's Gutai & A.U." in the 'E-mail Art Archives' of Guy Bleus, Center for Visual Arts, Hasselt, Belgium.