List of Famous people who died at 97

Joan Bridge was a British costume designer from Ripley in Derbyshire. She won at the 39th Academy Awards in the category of Best Costume design-Color for her work on A Man for All Seasons, which she shared with Elizabeth Haffenden. In addition she won the BAFTA as well. She worked on over 100 films during her long career.

Hortense Calisher was an American writer of fiction and the second female president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Melba Newell Phillips was an American physicist and pioneer science educator. One of the first doctoral students of J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley, Phillips completed her Ph.D. in 1933, a time when few women pursued careers in science. In 1935 Oppenheimer and Phillips published their description of the Oppenheimer–Phillips process, an early contribution to nuclear physics that explained the behavior of accelerated nuclei of radioactive hydrogen atoms. Phillips was also known for refusing to cooperate with a U.S. Senate judiciary subcommittee's investigation on internal security during the McCarthy era that led to her dismissal from her professorship at Brooklyn College, where she was a professor of science from 1938 until 1952.

Karl Johann Freudenberg was a German chemist who did early seminal work on the absolute configurations to carbohydrates, terpenes, and steroids, and on the structure of cellulose and other polysaccharides, and on the nature, structure, and biosynthesis of lignin. The Research Institute for the Chemistry of Wood and Polysaccharides at the University of Heidelberg was created for him in the mid to late 1930s, and he led this until 1969.

Leon Askin was an Austrian Jewish actor best known in North America for portraying the character General Burkhalter on the TV situation comedy Hogan's Heroes.

William Barnard Justice was an animator and engineer for The Walt Disney Company. He was a graduate of the Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis.