List of Famous people who died in 1979

Alexander Schawinsky, known as Xanti Schawinsky was a Swiss painter, photographer and theatre designer. An alumnus of the Bauhaus, Schawinsky belonged to the circle around Bauhaus founder and architect Walter Gropius.

Eduard Bargheer was a German painter and printmaker. His early oeuvre had a close affinity to Expressionism.

Sherman Todd was an American film editor and producer. He was nominated for two Academy Awards in the category Best Film Editing for the films The Long Voyage Home and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Todd died in June 1979 in Laguna Beach, California, at the age of 75. His body was cremated.

Reo Franklin Fortune was a New Zealand-born social anthropologist. Originally trained as a psychologist, Fortune was a student of some of the major theorists of British and American social anthropology including Alfred Cort Haddon, Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown. He lived an international life, holding various academic and government positions: in China, at Lingnan University from 1937 to 1939; in Toledo, Ohio, USA from 1940 to 1941; in Toronto, Canada, from 1941 to 1943; in Burma, as government anthropologist, from 1946 to 1947; and finally, at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom from 1947 to 1971, as lecturer in social anthropology specialising in Melanesian language and culture.

Ernst Woermann was a German diplomat who worked for the Foreign Office under the Third Reich. He was a junior state secretary of the German Foreign Ministry (1940–43) and the German ambassador to the Nanjing Nationalist Government, the Japanese puppet government in China (1943–45).