List of Famous people who died at 88

Stefan Kapłaniak "Cenek" was a Polish sprint canoer who competed from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. Competing in three Summer Olympics, he won a bronze medal in the K-2 1000 m event at Rome in 1960.

Knut Andersen was a Norwegian film director. He was born in Harstad. He directed a series of films, including Sus og dus på by'n (1968), Ballad of the Masterthief Ole Hoiland (1970), Marikens bryllup (1972), Under a Stone Sky (1974), Karjolsteinen (1977), and Den sommeren jeg fylte 15 (1975). He received the Amanda Committee's Honorary Award in 2007.

Elisabeth Bergner was an Austrian-British actress. Primarily a stage actress, her career flourished in Berlin and Paris before she moved to London to work in films. Her signature role was Gemma Jones in Escape Me Never, a play written for her by Margaret Kennedy. She played Gemma first in London and then in the Broadway debut, and in a film version for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. In 1943, Bergner returned to Broadway in the play The Two Mrs. Carrolls, for which she won the Distinguished Performance Medal from the Drama League.

Luigi Taveri was a Swiss professional Grand Prix motorcycle road racer. He competed in the FIM motorcycle Grand Prix world championships from 1954 to 1966. Taveri is notable for being a three-time 125cc road racing world champion. Although he specialised in the smaller engined machines, Taveri is the only competitor to have scored points in six Grand Prix classes: 50cc, 125cc, 250cc, 350cc, 500cc and Sidecars. In 2016, he was named an FIM Legend for his motorcycling achievements.

Margarete Buber-Neumann, a German communist, wrote the memoir Under Two Dictators about her imprisonment within a Soviet prison, and later a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. She is also known for having testified in the so-called "trial of the century" about the Kravchenko Affair in France.

Frank Clifton Bossard was a British Secret Intelligence Service agent who provided classified documents to the Soviet Union in the 1960s.

Pierre Hadot was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy specializing in ancient philosophy, particularly Neoplatonism.

Karl Hurm was a contemporary German painter. Hurm was a self-taught artist whose paintings in the style referred to as naïve art have been on permanent display in an exhibition at the municipal art museum Ölmühle in Haigerloch (Germany) since 1998.

Jorge Grau was a Spanish director, scriptwriter, playwright and painter. His 1965 film Acteón was entered into the 4th Moscow International Film Festival. In 1973, he directed Ceremonia sangrienta, starring Ewa Aulin. In 1974, he directed the cult zombie film The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue Grau died on 27 December 2018.

Mahmut Makal was a Turkish writer, poet and teacher who initiated the "Village Literature" movement in 1950 with the publication of his book ‘Bizim Köy’.