List of Famous people who died in 1981

Shinji Sogō was the fourth president of the Japanese National Railways (JNR), and is credited with the creation of the first "bullet train", the Tōkaidō Shinkansen.

General Prince Yasuhiko Asaka was the founder of a collateral branch of the Japanese imperial family and a career officer in the Imperial Japanese Army. Son-in-law of Emperor Meiji and uncle by marriage of Emperor Hirohito, Prince Asaka was commander of Japanese forces in the final assault on Nanjing, then the capital city of Nationalist China, in December 1937. He is alleged to have been a perpetrator of the Nanking massacre in 1937, but he was never charged.

Wilhelmine Lübke was a German teacher and the wife of Heinrich Lübke. When he became President of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1959, she represented the country internationally. She founded the Kuratorium Deutsche Altershilfe and was president of the Müttergenesungswerk. The Wilhelmine-Lübke-Preis is named after her.

Georg Haas was an Austrian-born Israeli herpetologist, malacologist and paleontologist, one of the founders of zoological research in Israel. Haas studied zoology in the University of Vienna. In 1932 he joined the Hebrew University staff and during the next four decades Haas influenced several generations of young Israeli scientists.

Nahed Sherif, also romanised as Nahied Sherif, was an Egyptian actress who came to prominence in Egyptian and Lebanese films of the 1960s and 1970s.

Ann Cole Lowe was an American fashion designer and the first African American to become a noted fashion designer. Lowe's one-of-a-kind designs were a favorite among high society matrons from the 1920s to the 1960s. She was best known for designing the ivory silk taffeta wedding dress worn by Jacqueline Bouvier when she married John F. Kennedy in 1953.

Alphonse A. Burnand, Jr. was an American sailor who competed in the 1932 Summer Olympics.

Harry Frederick Harlow was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-separation, dependency needs, and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which manifested the importance of caregiving and companionship to social and cognitive development. He conducted most of his research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow worked with him for a short period of time.

Princess Natalia Pavlovna Paley was a Russian aristocrat who was a non-dynastic member of the Romanov family. A daughter of Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich of Russia, she was a first cousin of the last Russian emperor, Nicholas II. After the Russian Revolution, she emigrated first to France and later to the United States. She became a fashion model, socialite, vendeuse, and briefly pursued a career as a film actress.

Marcel Adios Breuer, was a Hungarian-born modernist architect, and furniture designer. At the Bauhaus he designed the Wassily Chair and the Cesca Chair which is “among the 10 most important chairs of the 20^th century.” Breuer extended the sculpture vocabulary he had developed in the carpentry shop at the Bauhaus into a personal architecture that made him one of the world's most popular architects at the peak of 20th-century design. His work includes art museums, libraries, college buildings, office buildings, and residences. Many are in a Brutalist architecture style, including the former IBM Research and Development facility which was the birthplace of the first personal computer.