List of Famous people who died in 1979

Thomas Joseph Wolf Jr. was an American composer and piano player. He was best known for his songwriting collaboration with Fran Landesman.

Paul Dessau was a German composer and conductor. He collaborated with Bertolt Brecht and composed incidental music for his plays, and several operas based on them.

Thelma Kingsbury (1911-1979), was an English-born, naturalised American sportswoman who won major badminton titles in the British Isles and then in the USA from the early 1930s to the early 1950s.

Christian Dotremont,, was a Belgian painter and poet who was born in Tervuren, Belgium. He was a founding member of the Revolutionary Surrealist Group (1946) and he also founded COBRA together with Danish artist Asger Jorn. In this capacity he was responsible for bringing Henri Lefebvre's Critique de la vie quotidienne (1946) to the group's attention. He later became well known for his painted poems, which he called logograms.

Erwin Kramer was an East German politician who served as both Minister of Transportation and General Director of the Deutsche Reichsbahn.

Kurt Kasznar was an American stage, film, and television actor who played roles on Broadway, appearing in the original productions of Waiting for Godot, The Sound of Music and Barefoot in the Park, and had many notable parts in television, including the science fiction series Land of the Giants, and feature films.

Mary Edith Scott was a New Zealand novelist, teacher and librarian. She was a prolific writer who specialised in romantic comedies set in rural New Zealand, and her books were widely read both in New Zealand and overseas. From 1953 to 1978 she wrote at a rate of at least one book per year. She published over thirty novels, five detective novels written jointly with Joyce West, an autobiography, and three collections of plays.

Robert Vernay was a French director and screenwriter.