List of Famous people who died in 1979

Jim Fritzell was an American television and film screenwriter.

Stanley Newcomb Kenton was an American popular music and jazz artist. As a pianist, composer, arranger and band leader, he led an innovative and influential jazz orchestra for almost four decades. Though Kenton had several pop hits from the early 1940s into the 1960s, his music was always forward-looking. Kenton was also a pioneer in the field of jazz education, creating the Stan Kenton Jazz Camp in 1959 at Indiana University.

Franklin "Pete" Adreon was an American film and television director, producer, screenwriter, and actor.

Roger Lambrecht was a Belgian road bicycle racer. He rode professionally from 1945 to 1954 and won 18 races, which included two stages of the 1948 and 1949 Tour de France; he wore the yellow jersey for two stages in 1948 and one stage in 1949.

John Robert Cartwright, was the 12th Chief Justice of Canada.

Angiolo Mazzoni was a state architect and engineer of the Italian Fascist government of the 1920s and 1930s.

Peggy Anne Donyale Aragonea Peugot Luna, better known as Donyale Luna, was an American supermodel and actress who gained popularity in Western Europe during the late 1960s, generally cited as “the first black supermodel”, Luna was the first African-American model to appear on the cover of the British edition of Vogue, in March 1966. She entered modeling in a period that favored "white passing models" and has been described as "the first black model who really began to change things; to enable more diverse beauty paradigms to break through". She is known to have been a covergirl 11 times between 1965 and 1975.

Doris Packer was an American actress, possibly best known for her recurring role as Mrs. Cornelia Rayburn, Theodore Cleaver's elementary school principal in the television series, Leave It to Beaver.

Bergetta "Dorothy" Peterson was an American actress. She began her acting career on Broadway before appearing in more than eighty Hollywood films.