List of Famous people who died in 1981

Mikhail Ivanovich Zharov was a Soviet actor.

Hiroshi Kamiya is a Japanese professional shogi player ranked 8-dan.

Johanna Elisabeth (Joke) Smit was a well-known Dutch feminist and politician in the 1970s.

Mary Lou Williams was an American jazz pianist, arranger, and composer. She wrote hundreds of compositions and arrangements and recorded more than one hundred records. Williams wrote and arranged for Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, and she was friend, mentor, and teacher to Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie.

Hu Lancheng was a Chinese writer and politician who was denounced as a traitor for serving a propaganda official in the Wang Jingwei regime, the Japanese puppet regime during the Second Sino-Japanese War. He was the first husband of the celebrated novelist Eileen Chang.

John Bernard Lee, known as Bernard Lee, was an English actor, best known for his role as M in the first eleven Eon-produced James Bond films. Lee's film career spanned the years 1934 to 1979, though he had appeared on stage from the age of six. He was trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Lee appeared in over one hundred films, as well as on stage and in television dramatisations. He was known for his roles as authority figures, often playing military characters or policemen in films such as The Third Man, The Blue Lamp, The Battle of the River Plate, and Whistle Down the Wind. He died of stomach cancer in 1981, aged 73.

Ali Suat Hayri Ürgüplü was a Turkish politician who served a brief term as Prime Minister of Turkey in 1965. He was also the last Prime Minister to be born outside the territory of present-day Turkey, being born in Damascus, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire.

Glauber de Andrade Rocha, better known as Glauber Rocha, was a Brazilian film director, actor and screenwriter. He was one of the most influential moviemakers of Brazilian cinema and a key figure of Cinema Novo. His films Black God, White Devil and Entranced Earth are often considered to be two of the greatest achievements in Brazilian cinematic history, being selected by Abraccine as, respectively, the second and fifth best Brazilian films of all-time.

Isabel Garcés Cerezal (1901–1981) was a Spanish stage and film actress.

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan’s work has marked the French and international intellectual landscape, having made a significant impact on continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical theory, feminist theory and film theory as well as on psychoanalysis itself.