List of Famous people who died in 1978

Mir Anvar Pashayev, known by his literary pen-name Mir Jalal, was an Azerbaijani writer and literary critic. He was the grandfather of Azerbaijan's current First Lady Mehriban Aliyeva.

Cecil André Mesritz, known professionally as André Morell, was an English actor. He appeared frequently in theatre, film and on television from the 1930s to the 1970s. His best known screen roles were as Professor Bernard Quatermass in the BBC Television serial Quatermass and the Pit (1958–59), and as Doctor Watson in the Hammer Film Productions version of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959). He also appeared in the films The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Ben-Hur (1959), in several of Hammer's horror films throughout the 1960s and in the acclaimed ITV historical drama The Caesars (1968).

Albert Sercu was a Belgian professional road bicycle racer. He is most known for his silver medal in the Elite race of the 1947 UCI Road World Championships. He rode in the 1947 Tour de France. He is the father of Patrick Sercu.

Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was the primary instigator and theorist of the so-called "Objectivist" poets, a short lived collective of poets who after several decades of obscurity would reemerge around 1960 and become a significant influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.

Edward Higgins White was a United States Air Force general who served in the United States Army Air Forces Budget Office during World War II and commanded the 1503rd Air Transport Wing in the Korean War.

Wilhelm Bernhard Max Rose was a German actor. He appeared in more than one hundred films from 1936 to 1978.

Samuel Abraham Goudsmit was a Dutch-American physicist famous for jointly proposing the concept of electron spin with George Eugene Uhlenbeck in 1925.