List of Famous people who died in 1980

Y G Parthasarathy was a Tamil playwright, drama troupe owner and film actor who founded the drama troupe United Amateur Artistes (UAA) along with his friend Padmanabhan in 1952. His wife Y G Rajalakshmi was a popular educationist while his son Y G Mahendra is a film actor.Veteran Actress Vyjayanthimala is his Niece

Robert Edward "Bo" Rein was an American football and baseball player and football coach. He was a two-sport athlete at Ohio State University and served as the head football coach at North Carolina State University from 1976 to 1979, compiling a record of 27–18–1. Following the 1979 season, Rein had assumed the role as head coach at Louisiana State University, but was killed in an aircraft accident in January 1980 before he ever coached a game for the Tigers. Rein is the namesake of football player awards at Ohio State and NC State.

Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of many schools of theory, including structuralism, semiotics, social theory, design theory, anthropology, and post-structuralism. He was particularly known for developing and extending the field of semiotics through the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture.

Ellen Jane Froman was an American singer and actress. During her thirty-year career, Froman performed on stage, radio and television despite chronic health problems due to injuries sustained in a 1943 plane crash.

Cosmé McMunn, who used the name Cosmé McMoon, was an Irish-Mexican-American pianist and composer, best known as the accompanist to notably tone-deaf soprano Florence Foster Jenkins.

Eugene Willford "Gene" Markey was an American author, producer, screenwriter, and highly decorated naval officer.

Nelson Falcão Rodrigues was a Brazilian playwright, journalist and novelist. In 1943, he helped usher in a new era in Brazilian theater with his play Vestido de Noiva , considered revolutionary for the complex exploration of its characters' psychology and its use of colloquial dialogue. He went on to write many other seminal plays and today is widely regarded as Brazil's greatest playwright.

Katia Mann was the youngest child and only daughter of the German Jewish mathematician and artist Alfred Pringsheim and his wife Hedwig Pringsheim, who was an actress in Berlin before her marriage. Katia was also a granddaughter of the writer and women's rights activist Hedwig Dohm. Her twin brother Klaus Pringsheim was a conductor, composer, music writer and music pedagogue, active in Germany and Japan. She married the writer Thomas Mann.

Friederike Victoria "Joy" Adamson was a naturalist, artist and author. Her book, Born Free, describes her experiences raising a lion cub named Elsa. Born Free was printed in several languages, and made into an Academy Award-winning movie of the same name. In 1977, she was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art.

İlhan Erdost was a Turkish publisher.