List of Famous people who died in 1978

Albert Arnold "Buddy" Gillespie was an American cinema special effects artist.

Raffaello Brignetti was an Italian writer. He grew up on the island of Elba where his father was a lighthouse keeper. He moved to Rome in the middle of the Second World War, and spent a couple of years in German labour camps. He studied modern Italian literature at university, graduating in 1947. He was a disciple of Ungaretti, in common with other young idealistic intellectuals of his era such as Leone Piccioni, Silori Luigi, Mario Petrucciani, Elio Filippo Accrocca, etc.

Mamadou Ouédraogo was a politician in the French Upper Volta.

François Varillon (1905–1978) was a French Jesuit and theologian. He was also a writer of some significance. He entered the Society of Jesus, as a novitiate, at 22 and was ordained in 1937. He won the Grand prix catholique de littérature in 1974 for L’humilité de Dieu.

Leone Minassian was an Italian painter and printmaker of Armenian descent. His work is an important representative of European post-war abstract painting. Minassian lived in Venice for more than 40 years.

Jivraj Narayan Mehta was an Indian politician and the first Chief Minister of Gujarat. He served as the first "Dewan" of the erstwhile Baroda state, and Indian high commissioner to the United Kingdom from 1963 to 1966.

Samuel Storey, Baron Buckton, known as Sir Samuel Storey, 1st Baronet, from 1960 to 1966, was a British Conservative politician.

Ida Noddack, née Tacke, was a German chemist and physicist. In 1934 she was the first to mention the idea later named nuclear fission. With her husband - Walter Noddack - and Otto Berg she discovered element 75, rhenium. She was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh was an Irish Fianna Fáil politician, judge and barrister who served as the fifth President of Ireland from December 1974 to October 1976. He served as a Judge of the European Court of Justice from 1973 to 1974, Chief Justice of Ireland from 1961 to 1973, a Judge of the Supreme Court from 1953 to 1973, and Attorney General of Ireland from 1946 to 1948 and from 1951 to 1953.