List of Famous people who died in 1979

Nino Pavese was an Italian actor and voice actor.

Johannes "Jan" de Klerk, was a South African politician. He was the father of F. W. de Klerk, the last apartheid State President of South Africa.

James Jerome Gibson, was an American psychologist and one of the most important contributors to the field of visual perception. Gibson challenged the idea that the nervous system actively constructs conscious visual perception, and instead promoted ecological psychology, in which the mind directly perceives environmental stimuli without additional cognitive construction or processing. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked him as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, David Rumelhart, Louis Leon Thurstone, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S. Woodworth.

Giorgio Ambrosoli was an Italian lawyer who was gunned down while investigating the malpractice of banker Michele Sindona.