List of Famous people who died in 1986

Sayyid Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari, also spelled Shariat-Madari, was an Iranian Grand Ayatollah. He favoured the traditional Shiite practice of keeping clerics away from governmental positions and was a critic of Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini, denouncing the taking hostage of diplomats at the US embassy in Tehran. In 1982 he was accused of being part of a plot to bomb Khomeini's home and to overthrow the Islamic republic, and he remained under house arrest until his death in 1986. His followers also opposed Ruhollah Khomeini.

Ernst Haas was an Austrian-American photojournalist and color photographer. During his 40-year career, Haas bridged the gap between photojournalism and the use of photography as a medium for expression and creativity. In addition to his coverage of events around the globe after World War II, Haas was an early innovator in color photography. His images were disseminated by magazines like Life and Vogue and, in 1962, were the subject of the first single-artist exhibition of color photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art. He served as president of the cooperative Magnum Photos, and his book The Creation (1971) was one of the most successful photography books ever, selling 350,000 copies.

Arne Carl-August Beurling was a Swedish mathematician and professor of mathematics at Uppsala University (1937–1954) and later at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Beurling worked extensively in harmonic analysis, complex analysis and potential theory. The "Beurling factorization" helped mathematical scientists to understand the Wold decomposition, and inspired further work on the invariant subspaces of linear operators and operator algebras, e.g. Håkan Hedenmalm's factorization theorem for Bergman spaces.

Willi Ankermüller was a German politician and jurist. He represented the Christian Social Union of Bavaria (CSU), and was a member of the Landtag of Bavaria in the 1950s.

László Lékai was Archbishop of Esztergom and a Cardinal.

Olive Deering was an American actress of film, television, and the stage, active from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. She was a life member of The Actors Studio, as was her elder brother, Alfred Ryder.