List of Famous people who died in 1981

Louise Lorraine was an American film actress.

Feng Yong was a Chinese educator, military leader and politician. The eldest son of the warlord Feng Delin, Feng Yong was a member of the Standing Committee of the Northeast Administrative Committee. Feng and Zhang Xueliang were born in the same year and grew up together. Theirs fathers were both strong warlords. Zhang Xueliang would become the “Young Marshal”, while Feng chose to set up a Western-style university in China.

Harry Rudolph von Zell was an American announcer of radio programs, and an actor in films and television shows. He is best remembered for his work on The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, and for once mispronouncing President Herbert Hoover's name on the air, a slip that was exaggerated on a later comedy record album.

Odd Hassel was a Norwegian physical chemist and Nobel Laureate.

Jack Warner, OBE was a British film and television actor. He is closely associated with the role of PC George Dixon, which he played in the 1950 film The Blue Lamp and later in the television series Dixon of Dock Green from 1955 until 1976, but he was also for some years one of Great Britain's most popular film stars.

H. C. Westermann was a highly influential and important American sculptor and printmaker whose art constituted a scathing commentary on militarism and materialism. His sculptures frequently incorporated traditional carpentry and marquetry techniques. From the late 1950s until his death in 1981, Westermann worked with a number of materials and formal devices to address a range of personal, literary, artistic, and pop-cultural references. The artist's sculptural oeuvre is distinguished by its intricate craftsmanship, in which wood, metal, glass, and other materials are laboriously hand-tooled, and by its ability to convey an offbeat, often humorous, individualistic sensibility.

Rebecca Craighill Lancefield was a prominent American microbiologist. She joined the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York in 1918, and was associated with that institute throughout her long and outstanding career. Her bibliography comprises more than 50 publications published over 60 years.

Gregory Breit was a Russian-born Jewish American physicist and professor at New York University (1929–1934), University of Wisconsin–Madison (1934–1947), Yale University (1947–1968), and University at Buffalo (1968–1973). In 1921, he was Paul Ehrenfest's assistant in Leiden University.