List of Famous people who died at 94
Abbé Pierre
Abbé Pierre, OFM Cap, was a French Catholic priest, member of the Resistance during World War II, and deputy of the Popular Republican Movement (MRP). Abbé is a courtesy title given to Catholic priests in French-speaking countries.
James Noble
James Wilkes Noble was an American actor, best known for his portrayal of sweet-natured, naive Governor Eugene X. Gatling on ABC's 1979–1986 sitcom Benson.
Barbara Billingsley
Barbara Billingsley was an American film, television, voice, and stage actress. She began her career with uncredited roles in Three Guys Named Mike (1951), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Invaders from Mars (1953) and was featured in the 1957 movie The Careless Years, opposite Natalie Trundy before appearing in recurring TV roles such as The Brothers.
Shirley Booth
Shirley Booth was an American actress. One of only 24 performers to achieve the Triple Crown of Acting, Booth was the recipient of an Academy Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards and three Tony Awards.
Les Paul
Lester William Polsfuss, known as Les Paul, was an American jazz, country, and blues guitarist, songwriter, luthier, and inventor. He was one of the pioneers of the solid-body electric guitar, and his prototype, called the Log, served as inspiration for the Gibson Les Paul. Paul taught himself how to play guitar, and while he is mainly known for jazz and popular music, he had an early career in country music. He is credited with many recording innovations. His early experiments with overdubbing, delay effects such as tape delay, phasing effects and multitrack recording were among the first to attract widespread attention.
Dorothy Manley
Dorothy Gladys Manley was a British sprinter. She competed in the 1948 Summer Olympics, held in London, in the 100 metres where she won the silver medal with a time of 12.2 seconds. This made her the first British female to win an Olympic sprint medal. She was also a medallist in the 1950 British Empire Games, and the 1950 European Athletics Championships.
Ursula Franklin
Ursula Martius Franklin was a German-Canadian metallurgist, research physicist, author, and educator who taught at the University of Toronto for more than 40 years. She was the author of The Real World of Technology, which is based on her 1989 Massey Lectures; The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map, a collection of her papers, interviews, and talks; and Ursula Franklin Speaks: Thoughts and Afterthoughts, containing 22 of her speeches and five interviews between 1986 and 2012. Franklin was a practising Quaker and actively worked on behalf of pacifist and feminist causes. She wrote and spoke extensively about the futility of war and the connection between peace and social justice. Franklin received numerous honours and awards, including the Governor General's Award in Commemoration of the Persons Case for promoting the equality of girls and women in Canada and the Pearson Medal of Peace for her work in advancing human rights. In 2012, she was inducted into the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame. A Toronto high school, Ursula Franklin Academy, has been named in her honour.
Dorival Caymmi
Dorival Caymmi was a Brazilian singer, songwriter, actor, and painter active for more than 70 years beginning in 1933. He contributed to the birth of Brazil's bossa nova movement, and several of his samba pieces, such as "Samba da Minha Terra", "Doralice" and "Saudade da Bahia", have become staples of música popular brasileira. Equally notable are his ballads celebrating the fishermen and women of Bahia, including "Promessa de Pescador", "O Que É Que a Baiana Tem?", and "Milagre". Caymmi composed about 100 songs in his lifetime, and many of his works are now considered to be Brazilian classics. Both Brazilian and non-Brazilian musicians have covered his songs.
Yoichiro Nambu
Yoichiro Nambu was a Japanese-American physicist and professor at the University of Chicago. Known for his contributions to the field of theoretical physics, he was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2008 for the discovery in 1960 of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics, related at first to the strong interaction's chiral symmetry and later to the electroweak interaction and Higgs mechanism. The other half was split equally between Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature."
Byron Nelson
John Byron Nelson Jr. was an American professional golfer between 1935 and 1946, widely considered one of the greatest golfers of all time.