List of Famous people who died in 1981

Karl August Leopold Böhm was an Austrian conductor. He was best known for his performances of the music of Mozart, Wagner and Richard Strauss.

Cláudio Pêcego de Moraes Coutinho was a Brazilian football manager who coached Brazil from 1977 to 1980 and Los Angeles Aztecs in 1981. He died as a result of a scuba diving accident at Rio de Janeiro.

Christy Brown was an Irish writer and painter who had cerebral palsy and was able to write or type only with the toes of one foot. His most recognized work is his autobiography, titled My Left Foot (1954). It was later made into a 1989 Academy Award-winning film of the same name, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as Brown.

Ewald Wenck was a German actor. He appeared in more than 230 films and television shows between 1919 and 1978.

Yury Valentinovich Trifonov was a leading representative of the so-called Soviet "Urban Prose". He was considered a close contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981.

Mack Gray was an American actor who was the brother of Joe Gray and great-uncle of Jon Abrahams.

Hephzibah Menuhin was an American-Australian pianist, writer, and human rights campaigner. She was sister to the violinist Yehudi Menuhin and to the pianist, painter, and poet Yaltah Menuhin. She was also a linguist and writer, co-authoring several books and writing many papers with her second husband, Richard Hauser.

Karl-Jesko Otto Robert von Puttkamer was a German admiral who was naval adjutant to Adolf Hitler during World War II.

Chief Dan George, OC was a chief of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, a Coast Salish band whose Indian reserve is located on Burrard Inlet in the southeast area of the District of North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He was also an actor, musician, poet and author; his best-known written work was "My Heart Soars". As an actor, he is best remembered for portraying Old Lodge Skins opposite Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man (1970), for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor; also for his role in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), as Lone Watie, opposite Clint Eastwood.

Jean Eustache was a French filmmaker. During his short career, he completed numerous short films, in addition to a pair of highly regarded features, of which the first, The Mother and the Whore, is considered a key work of post-Nouvelle Vague French cinema.