List of Famous people who died in 1986

Mircea Eliade was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day. His theory that hierophanies form the basis of religion, splitting the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time, has proved influential. One of his most instrumental contributions to religious studies was his theory of eternal return, which holds that myths and rituals do not simply commemorate hierophanies, but, at least to the minds of the religious, actually participate in them.

Don Towsley was an animator working at Walt Disney Animation Studios, and later at MGM and Filmation.

Anita Lorraine Cobby was a 26-year-old Australian registered nurse and beauty pageant winner who was kidnapped while walking home from Blacktown railway station after dining out with two Sydney Hospital colleagues in Surry Hills, New South Wales, just before 10:00 p.m. on 2 February 1986, and subsequently sexually assaulted and murdered. Two days after being reported missing, Cobby's body was discovered on a rural farm in Prospect. Investigations led to the arrest of five men who were later convicted of her abduction, rape and murder on 10 June 1987 and each sentenced to life imprisonment, without the possibility of parole, on 16 June 1987.

André Maelbrancke was a Belgian racing cyclist. He won the Belgian national road race title in 1942.

Gleb Vassielievich Wataghin was a Russian-Italian experimental physicist and a great scientific leader who gave a great impulse to the teaching and research on physics in two continents: in the University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; and in the University of Turin, Turin, Italy.

Otto Knefler was a German association football player and manager.

Jane Carroll Dornacker was an American rock musician, actress, comedian and traffic reporter. She gained fame as a comedian, actor, dancer and as an associate and songwriter for the San Francisco rock band The Tubes; she also led her own band, Leila and the Snakes.