List of Famous people who died in 1948

William Nicholas Selig was a pioneer of the American motion picture industry. In 1896 he created one of the first film production companies, Selig Polyscope Company of Chicago. Selig produced a string of commercially successful films in the early years of the film industry. His The Tramp and the Dog (1896) is considered the first narrative film set in Chicago. Selig claimed to have made the first narrative film shot in Los Angeles, The Count of Monte Cristo, and, in 1909, established what may have been the first permanent L.A. studio, in Edendale, Los Angeles. He also produced the first Wizard of Oz film in 1910, the first U.S. company to shoot a two-reel film, Damon and Pythias (1908), and the first true serial, The Adventures of Kathlyn (1913–1914).

George Noble Plunkett KCHS was an Irish nationalist politician, museum director and biographer, who served as Minister for Fine Arts from 1921 to 1922, Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1919 to 1921 and Ceann Comhairle of Dáil Éireann in January 1919. He served as a Teachta Dála (TD) from 1918 to 1927. He was a Member of Parliament (MP) for Roscommon North from 1917 to 1922.

Blanche Zélia Joséphine Delacroix, better known as Caroline Lacroix, was the most prominent and notorious of Leopold II of Belgium's mistresses.

Mary Eaton was an American stage actress, singer, and dancer in the 1910s and 1920s, probably best known today from her appearance in the first Marx Brothers film The Cocoanuts (1929). A professional performer since childhood, she enjoyed success in stage productions such as the Ziegfeld Follies. She appeared in another early sound film Glorifying the American Girl (1929). Her career declined sharply during the 1930s and a battle with alcoholism led to her death in October 1948 from cirrhosis at the age of 47.

Pompeu Fabra i Poch was a Catalan engineer and grammarian. He was the main author of the normative reform of contemporary Catalan language.

Frederic Logan Paxson was an American historian. He had also been President of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association. He had undergraduate and PhD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a master's from Harvard University. He taught at Wisconsin as successor to Frederick Jackson Turner and the University of California-Berkeley from 1932 to 1947.

Andrew Ramsay "Bunny" Don-Wauchope was a Scottish international rugby union back who played club rugby for Cambridge and Fettesian-Lorettonian. Don Wauchope played an important role within the early growth of Scottish rugby and after retiring from international rugby he became a referee and was the President of the Scottish Rugby Union. He was considered Scotland's outstanding half-back of the early 1880s and is credited as being one of the pioneers of modern half-back play.

William Burress was an American actor. He appeared in more than seventy films from 1915 to 1939.

Raymond Benedict McCarey was an American film director, brother of director Leo McCarey.

Väinö Tanner (1881–1948) was a Finnish geographer, geologist and diplomat. Tanner is best known for his studies on the Quaternary geology of northern Finland. He was a vocal opponent to the Finnicization of the University of Helsinki.