List of Famous people who died in 1979

Gladys Louise Smith, known professionally as Mary Pickford, was a Canadian-American film actress and producer with a career that spanned five decades. A pioneer in the American film industry, she co-founded Pickford–Fairbanks Studios and United Artists, and was one of the 36 founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Pierre Goldman was a French left-wing intellectual who was convicted of several robberies and mysteriously assassinated. It has been suspected that the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación (GAL) death squad was involved in his murder. His half-brother Jean-Jacques Goldman is a popular French singer.

Robert Boulin was a French politician who served as Minister of Labour in the French Cabinet and was at the centre of a major real-estate scandal that ended only with his death in mysterious circumstances. At the time of his death he was the longest serving minister in post-revolution French history; only Louis XIV's Colbert served longer.

Sérgio Fernando Paranhos Fleury was a Brazilian police deputy during the Brazilian military dictatorship. He was chief of DOPS, the Brazilian "Department for Political and Social Order", that had a major role during the years of the Brazilian military government. Fleury was known for his violent temper and was officially accused of torture and homicide of numerous people, but died before being tried.

Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh was an Indian freedom fighter, journalist, writer, revolutionary, President in the Provisional Government of India, which served as the Indian Government in exile during World War I from Kabul in 1915, and social reformist in the Republic of India. He also formed the Executive Board of India in Japan in 1940 during the Second World War. He also took part in the Balkan War in the year 1911 along with his fellow students of MAO college. In recognition of his services, the government of India issued postage stamps in his honor. He is popularly known as "Aryan Peshwa".

Antonina Makarova was a Soviet war criminal and executioner who collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II. From 1942 to 1943 she executed hundreds of Soviet partisans and their family members by machine gun. Makarova was caught by the Soviet KGB in 1976 and executed three years later.

Park Chung-hee was a South Korean politician and Republic of Korea Army General who served as the President of South Korea from 1963 until his assassination in 1979, assuming that office after first ruling the country as head of a military dictatorship installed by the May 16 military coup d'état in 1961. Before his presidency, he was the chairman of the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction from 1961 to 1963 after a career as a military leader in the South Korean army.

Etan Kalil Patz was an American boy who was six years old on May 25, 1979, when he disappeared on his way to his school bus stop in the SoHo neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. His disappearance helped launch the missing children movement, which included new legislation and new methods for tracking down missing children. Several years after he disappeared, Patz was one of the first children to be profiled on the "photo on a milk carton" campaigns of the early 1980s. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan designated May 25—the anniversary of Etan's disappearance—as National Missing Children's Day in the United States.

Werner Theodor Otto Forßmann was a physician from Germany who shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Medicine for developing a procedure that allowed cardiac catheterization. In 1929, he put himself under local anesthesia and inserted a catheter into a vein of his arm. Not knowing if the catheter might pierce a vein, he put his life at risk. Forssmann was nevertheless successful; he safely passed the catheter into his heart.

Richard Arthur Beckinsale was an English actor, who played Lennie Godber in the BBC sitcom Porridge and Alan Moore in the British ITV sitcom Rising Damp. He was the father of actresses Samantha Beckinsale and Kate Beckinsale.