List of Famous people who died in 1973

General Alexander Archer Vandegrift, USMC was a United States Marine Corps four-star general. During World War II, he commanded the 1st Marine Division to victory in its first ground offensive of the war, the Battle of Guadalcanal. For his actions on August 7 to December 9, 1942, in the Solomon Islands campaign, he received the Medal of Honor. Vandegrift later served as the 18th Commandant of the Marine Corps. He was the first four-star general on active duty in the Marine Corps.

Max Julius Friedrich Brauer was a German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the first elected First Mayor of Hamburg after World War II.

Karl Waldemar Ziegler was a German chemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1963, with Giulio Natta, for work on polymers. The Nobel Committee recognized his "excellent work on organometallic compounds [which]...led to new polymerization reactions and ... paved the way for new and highly useful industrial processes". He is also known for his work involving free-radicals, many-membered rings, and organometallic compounds, as well as the development of Ziegler–Natta catalyst. One of many awards Ziegler received was the Werner von Siemens Ring in 1960 jointly with Otto Bayer and Walter Reppe, for expanding the scientific knowledge of and the technical development of new synthetic materials.

Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral was a Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean agricultural engineer, pan-africanist, intellectual, poet, theoretician, revolutionary, political organizer, nationalist and diplomat. He was one of Africa's foremost anti-colonial leaders.

Tanzan Ishibashi was a Japanese journalist and politician who was Prime Minister of Japan from 1956 to 1957. He was also Director General of the Japan Defense Agency in addition to being Prime Minister. During the same time he was the 2nd president of the Liberal Democratic Party, the majority party in the Diet. From 1952 to 1968 he was also the president of Rissho University. Being a member of Nichiren-shū, the name Tanzan is a religious name, as his profane name was Seizō (省三).

Alexander Socrates Onassis was an American-born Greek businessman. He was the son of the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis and his first wife Tina Livanos. He and his sister Christina Onassis were upset by his father's marriage to Jacqueline Kennedy, and he was credited with attempting to improve the relationship between his father and Stavros Niarchos.

José Eleazar López Contreras was President of Venezuela between 1935 and 1941. He was an army general and one of Juan Vicente Gómez's collaborators, serving as his War Minister from 1931. In 1939, López Contreras accepted on behalf of Venezuela the ships Koenigstein and Caribia which had fled with Jews from Germany.

Mehmet Nuri Dersimi also known as Baytar Nuri was a Kurdish writer, revolutionary and intellectual.

Nikolay Ilyich Kamov was a Soviet aerospace engineer, a pioneer in the design of helicopters, and founder of the Kamov helicopter design bureau.

Roger Williamson was a British racing driver, a two time British Formula 3 champion, who died during his second Formula One race, the 1973 Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort Circuit in the Netherlands.