List of Famous people who died in 1978

Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Arkhangelsky was a Soviet and Russian aircraft designer and doctor of technical sciences. Hero of Socialist Labour (1947)

Georges Speicher was a French cyclist who won the 1933 Tour de France along with three stage wins, and the 1933 World Cycling Championship.

Mario Castellani was an Italian comic actor, best known as the sidekick of famous comic actor Antonio De Curtis (Totò). He appeared with the latter in all his major movies, as well as many of Totò's theatre productions.

Jacques Marie Stanislas Jean Brugnon, nicknamed "Toto", was a French tennis player, one of the famous "Four Musketeers" from France who dominated tennis in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He was born in Paris and died in Paris.

Romola de Pulszky, , was a Hungarian aristocrat, the daughter of a politician and an actress. Her father had to go into exile when she was a child, and committed suicide in Australia. As a young woman she became interested in dance and specifically Vaslav Nijinsky, the noted premier danseur of the Ballets Russes. They married in Buenos Aires in 1913 while the company was on tour. They had two daughters, before he was institutionalized for the remaining 30 years of his life for schizophrenia.

The Honourable (Ralph) Edward Gathorne-Hardy was a British Bohemian socialite.

Bungo Fukusaki is a Japanese professional shogi player ranked 9-dan. He is a former 10-dan and Ōza major title holder.

George Maciunas was a Lithuanian American artist, born in Kaunas. A founding member and the central coordinator of Fluxus, an international community of artists, architects, composers, and designers, he is most famous for organising and performing early happenings and for assembling a series of highly influential artists' multiples.

James Bryant Conant was an American chemist, a transformative President of Harvard University, and the first U.S. Ambassador to West Germany. Conant obtained a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Harvard in 1916. During World War I he served in the U.S. Army, working on the development of poison gases, especially Lewisite. He became an assistant professor of chemistry at Harvard in 1919 and the Sheldon Emery Professor of Organic Chemistry in 1929. He researched the physical structures of natural products, particularly chlorophyll, and he was one of the first to explore the sometimes complex relationship between chemical equilibrium and the reaction rate of chemical processes. He studied the biochemistry of oxyhemoglobin providing insight into the disease methemoglobinemia, helped to explain the structure of chlorophyll, and contributed important insights that underlie modern theories of acid-base chemistry.

Geoffrey Gilyard Unsworth, OBE, BSC was a British cinematographer who worked on nearly 90 feature films spanning over more than 40 years. He is best known for his work on films such as Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bob Fosse's Cabaret and Richard Donner's Superman.