List of Famous people who died in 1977
Elvis Presley
Elvis Aaron Presley, also known simply as Elvis, was an American singer, musician and actor. He is regarded as one of the most significant cultural icons of the 20th century and is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or simply "the King". His energized interpretations of songs and sexually provocative performance style, combined with a singularly potent mix of influences across color lines during a transformative era in race relations, led him to both great success and initial controversy.
Charlie Chaplin
Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin was an English comic actor, filmmaker, and composer who rose to fame in the era of silent film. He became a worldwide icon through his screen persona, The Tramp, and is considered one of the most important figures in the history of the film industry. His career spanned more than 75 years, from childhood in the Victorian era until a year before his death in 1977, and encompassed both adulation and controversy.
Bing Crosby
Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby Jr. was an American singer, comedian and actor. The first multimedia star, Crosby was one of the most popular and influential musical artists of the 20th century. He was a leader in record sales, radio ratings, and motion picture grosses from 1930 to 1954. He made over seventy feature films and recorded more than 1,600 different songs.
J. Paul Getty
Jean Paul Getty, known widely as J. Paul Getty, was an American-born British petrol-industrialist, and the patriarch of the Getty family. He founded the Getty Oil Company, and in 1957 Fortune magazine named him the richest living American, while the 1966 Guinness Book of Records named him as the world's richest private citizen, worth an estimated $1.2 billion. At his death, he was worth more than $6 billion. A book published in 1996 ranked him as the 67th richest American who ever lived, based on his wealth as a percentage of the concurrent gross national product.
Anthony Eden
Robert Anthony Eden, 1st Earl of Avon,, was a British Conservative politician who served three periods as Foreign Secretary and then a relatively short term as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1955 to 1957.
Joan Crawford
Joan Crawford was an American film and television actress who began her career as a dancer in traveling theatrical companies before debuting as a chorus girl on Broadway. Crawford then signed a motion picture contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1925; her career spanned six decades, multiple studios, and controversies.
Matthew Garber
Matthew Adam Garber was a British child actor who played Michael Banks in the 1964 film Mary Poppins. He appeared in only two other films, The Three Lives of Thomasina and The Gnome-Mobile, all three times appearing alongside actress Karen Dotrice. All three appearances were in movies by Walt Disney Pictures.
Basil Brown
Basil John Wait Brown was an English self-taught archaeologist and astronomer who in 1939 discovered and excavated a 7th-century Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo in "one of the most important archaeological discoveries of all time".
Clarice Lispector
Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian novelist and short story writer acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, as an infant she moved to Brazil with her family, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War.
Steve Biko
Bantu Stephen Biko was a South African anti-apartheid activist. Ideologically an African nationalist and African socialist, he was at the forefront of a grassroots anti-apartheid campaign known as the Black Consciousness Movement during the late 1960s and 1970s. His ideas were articulated in a series of articles published under the pseudonym Frank Talk.