List of Famous people who died in 1984

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 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 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.

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.

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 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 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 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.

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."

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.