List of Famous people who died in 1984
Ansel Adams
Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating "pure" photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. He and Fred Archer developed an exacting system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a deeply technical understanding of how tonal range is recorded and developed in exposure, negative development, and printing. The resulting clarity and depth of such images characterized his photography.
Jon-Erik Hexum
Jon-Erik Hexum was an American actor and model, known for his lead roles in the TV series Voyagers! and Cover Up, and his supporting role as Pat Trammell in the biopic The Bear. He died by an accidental self-inflicted blank cartridge gunshot to the head on the set of Cover Up.
Indira Gandhi
Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi was an Indian politician and a central figure of the Indian National Congress. She was the first and, to date, only female Prime Minister of India. Indira Gandhi was the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India. She served as prime minister from January 1966 to March 1977 and again from January 1980 until her assassination in October 1984, making her the second longest-serving Indian prime minister after her father.
Ed Gein
Edward Theodore Gein, also known as the Butcher of Plainfield or the Plainfield Ghoul, was an American convicted murderer and body snatcher. Gein's crimes, committed around his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin, gathered widespread notoriety in 1957 after authorities discovered he had exhumed corpses from local graveyards and fashioned trophies and keepsakes from their bones and skin. Gein also confessed to killing two women: tavern owner Mary Hogan in 1954 and hardware store owner Bernice Worden in 1957.
Ray Kroc
Raymond Albert Kroc was an American businessman. He joined the California company McDonald's in 1954, after the McDonald brothers had franchised nine locations out from their original 1948 operation in San Bernardino. This set the stage for national expansion with the help of Kroc, eventually leading to a global franchise, making it the most successful fast food corporation in the world. Kroc was included in Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century, and amassed a multi-million dollar fortune during his lifetime. He owned the San Diego Padres baseball team from 1974 until his death in 1984.
Julio Corteza
Julio Cortázar, born Julio Florencio Cortázar American Spanish: [ˈxuljo korˈtasar] (listen); was an Argentine novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, Cortázar influenced an entire generation of Spanish-speaking readers and writers in America and Europe.
Marvin Gaye
Marvin Gaye was an American singer, songwriter, and record producer. He helped to shape the sound of Motown in the 1960s, first as an in-house session player and later as a solo artist with a string of hits, earning him the nicknames "Prince of Motown" and "Prince of Soul".
Johnny Weissmuller
Johnny Weissmuller was an Austro-Hungarian-born American competition swimmer, water polo player and actor. He was known for playing Edgar Rice Burroughs' ape man Tarzan in films of the 1930s and 1940s and for having one of the best competitive swimming records of the 20th century.
Andy Kaufman
Andrew Geoffrey Kaufman was an American comedian, wrestler, and performance artist. While often called a comedian, Kaufman described himself instead as a "song and dance man". He has sometimes been called an "anti-comedian". He disdained telling jokes and engaging in comedy as it was traditionally understood, once saying in a rare introspective interview, "I am not a comic, I have never told a joke. ... The comedian's promise is that he will go out there and make you laugh with him... My only promise is that I will try to entertain you as best I can."
Velma Barfield
Margie Velma Barfield was an American serial killer who was convicted of one murder, but who eventually confessed to six murders in total. Barfield was the first woman in the United States to be executed after the 1976 resumption of capital punishment and the first since 1962. She was also the first woman to be executed by lethal injection.
Jo Bouillon
Jo Bouillon was a French composer, conductor and violinist. As Joséphine Baker's fourth husband, he enjoyed prominence in the 1950s.
Harry Stockwell
Harry Bayless Stockwell was an American actor, voice actor, and singer.
Yuri Andropov
Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov was the sixth paramount leader of the Soviet Union and the fourth General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Following the 18-year rule of Leonid Brezhnev, Andropov served in the post from November 1982 until his death in February 1984.
C. L. Franklin
Clarence LaVaughn Franklin was an American Baptist minister and civil rights activist. Known as the man with the "Million-Dollar Voice", Franklin served as the pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan, from 1946 until he was shot and wounded in 1979. Franklin was also the father of the American singer and songwriter Aretha Franklin.
Yılmaz Güney
Yılmaz Güney was a Kurdish film director, scenarist, novelist, and actor. He quickly rose to prominence in the Turkish film industry. Many of his works were devoted to the plight of ordinary, working class people in Turkey. Güney won the Palme d'Or with the film Yol he co-produced with Şerif Gören at Cannes Film Festival in 1982. He was at constant odds with the Turkish government because of his portrayals of Kurdish culture, people and language in his movies. After killing a judge, something Yılmaz claimed to be innocent of, and being convicted in a trial in 1974, he fled the country and later lost his citizenship.
Truman Capote
Truman Garcia Capote was an American novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, playwright, and actor. Several of his short stories, novels, and plays have been praised as literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966), which he labeled a "nonfiction novel". His works have been adapted into more than 20 films and television dramas.
Jackie Coogan
John Leslie Coogan was an American actor and comedian who began his film career as a child actor in silent films.
Razzle
Nicholas Charles Dingley, better known by his stage name Razzle, was the English drummer of Finnish glam rock band Hanoi Rocks from 1982 until his death.
Jennifer Kendal
Jennifer Kapoor was an English actress and the founder of the Prithvi Theatre. She was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for the film 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981). Her other film appearances included Bombay Talkie (1970), Junoon (1978), Heat and Dust (1983), and Ghare Baire (1984).
Paquirri
Francisco Rivera Pérez, known as Paquirri, was a Spanish bullfighter.