List of Famous people who died in 1985

Leonard Thomas Lake, also known as Leonard Hill and a variety of other aliases, was an American serial killer. During the mid-1980s, he and accomplice Charles Ng raped, tortured and murdered an estimated eleven to 25 victims at a remote cabin in Calaveras County, California, in the Sierra Nevada foothills 150 miles east of San Francisco. After his arrest in 1985 on illegal weapons, auto theft, and fraud charges, Lake swallowed cyanide pills that he had sewn into his clothing, and died four days later. Human remains, videotapes, and journals found at the cabin later confirmed Ng's involvement, and were used to convict Ng on eleven counts of capital murder.

Giuseppe Greco was a hitman and high-ranking member of the Sicilian Mafia. A number of sources refer to him exclusively as Pino Greco, although Giuseppe was his Christian name; "Pino" is a frequent abbreviation of the name Giuseppe.

Johannes Hint was an Estonian scientist and the only person to create and successfully run a limited company under the communist planned economy of the Soviet Union. With his company, Dessim Ltd, he earned millions for the Soviet Union. His most important scientific invention was the building material silikaltsiit (Laprex), which was developed through the execution of the disintegrator system. His inventions are still widely used in Germany, Austria, the United States, Japan and Russia. Over 200 scientific publications, 62 inventions and 28 patents are accredited to his name.

Mario Majoni was an Italian water polo player who competed in the 1948 Summer Olympics.

Alfredo Fernández Martínez better known as Alfredo Mayo was a Spanish actor.

Heinz Hoffmann was Minister of National Defense in the Council of Ministers of the German Democratic Republic, and since 2 October 1973 member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party (SED).

Carl Schmitt was a German jurist, political theorist, and prominent member of the Nazi Party. Schmitt wrote extensively about the effective wielding of political power. A conservative theorist, he is noted as a critic of parliamentary democracy, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism, and his work has been a major influence on subsequent political theory, legal theory, continental philosophy, and political theology, but its value and significance are controversial, mainly due to his intellectual support for and active involvement with Nazism. Schmitt's work has attracted the attention of numerous philosophers and political theorists, including Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Susan Buck-Morss, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, Waldemar Gurian, Jaime Guzmán, Reinhart Koselleck, Friedrich Hayek, Chantal Mouffe, Antonio Negri, Leo Strauss, Adrian Vermeule, and Slavoj Žižek, among others.

Fikri Sönmez was a Turkish socialist politician, who served as the mayor of Fatsa district of Ordu Province between 1979 and 1980.

Fernand Braudel was a French historian and a leader of the Annales School. His scholarship focused on three main projects: The Mediterranean, Civilization and Capitalism (1955–79), and the unfinished Identity of France (1970–85). His reputation stems in part from his writings, but even more from his success in making the Annales School the most important engine of historical research in France and much of the world after 1950. As the dominant leader of the Annales School of historiography in the 1950s and 1960s, he exerted enormous influence on historical writing in France and other countries. He was a student of Henri Hauser (1866-1946).

Alexa Jordan Kenin was an American actress known for her supporting roles in several films released during the 1980s, including Little Darlings (1980), Honkytonk Man (1982), and Pretty in Pink (1986) which was released after her death.