List of Famous people who died in 1981

Reginald Cotterell Butler was an English sculptor. He was born at Bridgefoot House, Buntingford, Hertfordshire to Frederick William Butler (1880–1937) and Edith (1880–1969), daughter of blacksmith William Barltrop, of The Forge, Takeley, Essex. His parents were the Master and Matron of the Buntingford Union Workhouse. Frederick Butler, formerly a police constable, was a relative of the poet William Butler Yeats; Edith was of Anglo-French descent.

Frank de Kova was an American character actor in films, stage, and TV.

Wallace Kirkman Harrison was an American architect. Harrison started his professional career with the firm of Corbett, Harrison & MacMurray, participating in the construction of Rockefeller Center. He is best known for executing large public projects in New York City and upstate, many of them a result of his long and fruitful personal relationship with Nelson Rockefeller, for whom he served as an adviser.

Alfredo Guarini (1901–1981) was an Italian screenwriter, film producer and director. Guarini is noted in particular for his management of the career of the Italian actress Isa Miranda, who he eventually married. In the mid-1930s he was responsible for persuading her to work in a variety of different countries to build up a greater international profile after her breakthrough success in Everybody's Woman (1934).

Jerzy Neyman was a Polish mathematician and statistician who spent the first part of his professional career at various institutions in Warsaw, Poland and then at University College London, and the second part at the University of California, Berkeley. Neyman first introduced the modern concept of a confidence interval into statistical hypothesis testing and co-revised Ronald Fisher's null hypothesis testing.

Eric Rogers was an English composer, conductor and arranger, best known for composing the scores for twenty-two Carry On films.

Wladimir P. Seidel was a Russian-born German-American mathematician, and Doctor of Mathematics. He held a fellowship as a Benjamin Peirce Professor in Harvard University. During World War II, he was with the Montreal Theory group for the National Research Council of Canada.

Karl Steinhoff was a Minister-president (Ministerpräsident) of the German state (Land) of Brandenburg, then part of East Germany, and later served as East Germany's Minister of the Interior.

René Clair born René-Lucien Chomette, was a French filmmaker and writer. He first established his reputation in the 1920s as a director of silent films in which comedy was often mingled with fantasy. He went on to make some of the most innovative early sound films in France, before going abroad to work in the UK and USA for more than a decade. Returning to France after World War II, he continued to make films that were characterised by their elegance and wit, often presenting a nostalgic view of French life in earlier years. He was elected to the Académie française in 1960. Clair's best known films include Un chapeau de paille d'Italie, Sous les toits de Paris, Le Million (1931), À nous la liberté (1931), I Married a Witch (1942), and And Then There Were None (1945).

Mario Camerini was an Italian film director and screenwriter.