List of Famous people who died in 1986

Juan Nepomuceno Carlos Pérez Rulfo Vizcaíno, best known as Juan Rulfo, was a Mexican writer, screenwriter and photographer. He is best known for two literary works, the 1955 novel Pedro Páramo, and the collection of short stories El Llano en llamas (1953). This collection includes the popular tale "¡Diles que no me maten!".

Elisabeth Schwarzhaupt was a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union. She was Federal Minister of Health in the German Cabinet from 1961 to 1966, the first woman to hold a Ministerial position in Germany.

Lyudmila Vladimirovna Rudenko was a Soviet chess player and the second women's world chess champion, from 1950 until 1953.

Dr. Kashinath Ghanekar was a popular stage actor and dental surgeon.

James Francis Cagney Jr. was an American actor and dancer also known professionally as Jimmy Cagney. On stage and in film, Cagney was known for his consistently energetic performances, distinctive vocal style, and deadpan comic timing. He won acclaim and major awards for a wide variety of performances. He is remembered for playing multifaceted tough guys in films such as The Public Enemy (1931), Taxi! (1932), Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), The Roaring Twenties (1939), and White Heat (1949), finding himself typecast or limited by this reputation earlier in his career. He was able to negotiate dancing opportunities in his films and ended up winning the Academy Award for his role in the musical Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). In 1999 the American Film Institute ranked him eighth among its list of greatest male stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Orson Welles described Cagney as "maybe the greatest actor who ever appeared in front of a camera".

Vasily Ivanovich Ignatenko was a Soviet firefighter and first responder to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster. Ignatenko was raised on a collective farm near Gomel in the Belorussian SSR, and worked for a time as an electrician. He became a firefighter in 1980 as part of his service in the Soviet Military, and was employed as a paramilitary firefighter afterwards. On April 26th, 1986, Ignatenko's fire brigade was involved in mitigating the immediate aftermath of the Chernobyl Disaster, fighting the fires that were caused by the initial explosion. In the process, Ignatenko received a high dose of radiation and died in a Moscow radiological hospital eighteen days later.

Sterling Walter Hayden was an American actor, author, sailor and decorated Marine Corps officer and OSS agent. A leading man for most of his career, he specialized in westerns and film noir throughout the 1950s, in films such as John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954), and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956). He became noted for supporting roles in the 1960s, perhaps most memorably as General Jack D. Ripper in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).

Kathryn Elizabeth Smith, known professionally as Kate Smith and The First Lady of Radio, was an American soprano well known for her rendition of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America". She had a radio, television, and recording career spanning five decades, which reached its pinnacle in the 1940s. She became known as The Songbird of the South after her enduring popularity during World War II.

Minoru Yamasaki was a Japanese-American architect, best known for designing the original World Trade Center in New York City and several other large-scale projects. Yamasaki was one of the most prominent architects of the 20th century. He and fellow architect Edward Durell Stone are generally considered to be the two master practitioners of "New Formalism".

Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov was a Soviet politician and diplomat, an Old Bolshevik, and a leading figure in the Soviet government from the 1920s. Molotov served as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars from 1930 to 1941, and as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1939 to 1949 and from 1953 to 1956.