List of Famous people who died in 1979

Herbert Manfred "Zeppo" Marx was an American actor, comedian, theatrical agent, and engineer. He was the youngest and last survivor of the five Marx Brothers. He appeared in the first five Marx Brothers feature films, from 1929 to 1933, but then left the act to start his second career as an engineer and theatrical agent.

Aleksei Makarovich Smirnov was a Russian actor. He performed in more than fifty films between 1959 and 1977.

Elizabeth Hadley Richardson was the first wife of American author Ernest Hemingway. The two married in 1921 after a courtship of less than a year, and moved to Paris within months of being married. In Paris, Hemingway pursued a writing career, and through him Hadley met other expatriate British and American writers.

Merle Oberon was a British actress who began her film career in British films as Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). After her success in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), she traveled to the United States to make films for Samuel Goldwyn. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in The Dark Angel (1935). A traffic collision in 1937 caused facial injuries that could have ended her career, but she recovered and remained active in film and television until 1973.

Nikolai Olimpievich Gritsenko was a Soviet and Russian theater and film actor. He appeared in 33 films between 1942 and 1978. Gritsenko also was member of the Vakhtangov Theatre company in Moscow, Russia. There he was designated Honored Artist of the RSFSR and People's Artist of the USSR. He died on 8 December 1979, and was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery, in Moscow, Russia.

Jean Renoir was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s. His films La Grande Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939) are often cited by critics as among the greatest films ever made. He was ranked by the BFI's Sight & Sound poll of critics in 2002 as the fourth greatest director of all time. Among numerous honours accrued during his lifetime, he received a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award in 1975 for his contribution to the motion picture industry. Renoir was the son of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. He was one of the first filmmakers to be known as an auteur.

Shi Jianqiao was the daughter of the Chinese military officer Shi Congbin, whose killing she avenged by assassinating the former warlord Sun Chuanfang. The revenge killing and the legal proceedings that followed were highly publicized at the time and incited public debates over the concepts of filial piety and the rule of law.

Nadezhda Sergeevna Nadezhdina (1904/8-1979) was a Russian choreographer, ballerina, and former director of the Russian female dance troupe Beroyzka from its inception in 1948 until her death. She is the daughter of prominent writer Aleksandra Iakovlevna. She is known for the way she taught her dancers to move across a stage without seeming to move their feet. Beneath long, nearly floor-length gowns, her dancers learned to walk on the very tips of their toes, resulting in the impression that they are floating or gliding across the stage. Winner of the Stalin Prize of the third degree in 1950 and the Frederic Joliot-Curie Prize in 1959.

Carlo Schmid was a German academic and politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).

Norman Wilfred Lewis was an American painter, scholar, and teacher. Lewis, who was African-American and of Bermudian descent, was associated with abstract expressionism, and used representational strategies to focus on black urban life and his community's struggles.