List of Famous people who died in 1988

Heather Michele O'Rourke was an American child actress. She made her debut after being discovered by director Steven Spielberg while visiting MGM studios. Spielberg promptly cast her in the horror film Poltergeist (1982) as Carol Anne Freeling, and O'Rourke earned recognition for her performance. She then reprised the role in the second and third installments. O'Rourke was also recognized for her work in television, and appeared in recurring roles on Happy Days from 1982 to 1983, on Webster in 1983, as well as appearing in the television-film Surviving in 1985.

Judith Eva Barsi was an American child actress of the 1980s. She began her career in television, making appearances in commercials and television series as well as in the film Jaws: The Revenge. She provided voices for animated characters in The Land Before Time and All Dogs Go to Heaven. She and her mother, Maria, were killed in July 1988 in a double murder–suicide perpetrated in their home by her father, József Barsi.

Roy Kelton Orbison was an American singer, songwriter, and musician known for his impassioned singing style, complex song structures, and dark, emotional ballads. His music was described by critics as operatic, earning him the nicknames "the Caruso of Rock" and "the Big O". Many of Orbison's songs conveyed vulnerability at a time when most male rock-and-roll performers chose to project defiant masculinity. He was known for his shyness and stage fright, which he countered by wearing dark sunglasses.

Jessie Buckley is an Irish actress and singer. Her career began in 2008 as a contestant on the BBC TV talent show I'd Do Anything in which she placed second. In the same year she appeared in the West End revival of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music. She studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, from which she graduated in 2013. Buckley's early onscreen appearances include roles for BBC television series: Marya Bolkonskaya in the 2016 adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (2016), Lorna Bow in Taboo (2017) and Marian Halcombe in The Woman in White (2018).

Valery Alekseyevich Legasov was a Soviet inorganic chemist and a member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. He is now mainly remembered for his work as the chief of the commission investigating the Chernobyl disaster.

Raj Kapoor was an Indian film actor, producer and director of Indian cinema. He is widely regarded as the greatest showman in the history of Indian cinema and entertainment. He received multiple accolades, including three National Film Awards and 11 Filmfare Awards in India. The Filmfare Lifetime Achievement Award is named after Kapoor. He was a two-time nominee for the Palme d'Or grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival for his films Awaara (1951) and Boot Polish (1954). His performance in Awaara was ranked as one of the top ten greatest performances of all time by Time magazine. His films attracted worldwide audiences, particularly in Asia and Europe.

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji was an English composer, music critic, pianist and writer whose music, written over a period of seventy years, ranges from sets of miniatures to works lasting several hours. One of the most prolific 20th-century composers, he is best known for his piano pieces, notably nocturnes such as Gulistān and Villa Tasca, and large-scale, technically intricate compositions, which include seven symphonies for piano solo, four toccatas, Sequentia cyclica and 100 Transcendental Studies. He felt alienated from English society by reason of his homosexuality and mixed ancestry, and had a lifelong tendency to seclusion.

Kurt Georg Kiesinger was a German politician who served as Chancellor of Germany from 1 December 1966 to 21 October 1969. Before he became Chancellor he served as Minister President of Baden-Württemberg from 1958 to 1966 and as President of the Federal Council from 1962 to 1963. He was Chairman of the Christian Democratic Union from 1967 to 1971.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent. Basquiat first achieved fame as part of SAMO, a graffiti duo who wrote enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the late 1970s, where rap, punk, and street art coalesced into early hip-hop music culture. By the early 1980s, his neo-expressionist paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. At 21, Basquiat became the youngest artist to ever take part in documenta in Kassel. At 22, he was the youngest to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial in New York. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his art in 1992.

Anthony Provenzano, also known as Tony Pro, was a caporegime of the Genovese crime family New Jersey faction. Provenzano was known for his associations with Teamsters Union director Jimmy Hoffa due to Provenzano's job as an International Brotherhood of Teamsters president for Local 560 in Union City, New Jersey.

Andrew Roy Gibb was an English singer and songwriter. He was the younger brother of the Bee Gees: Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb.

Richard Phillips Feynman was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as his work in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. was an American lawyer, politician, and businessman. He served as a United States Congressman from New York from 1949 to 1955 and in 1963 was appointed United States Under Secretary of Commerce by President John F. Kennedy. He was appointed as the first chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 1965 to 1966 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Roosevelt also ran for Governor of New York twice. He was a son of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and served as an officer in the United States Navy during World War II.

Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs was a German theoretical physicist and atomic spy who supplied information from the American, British, and Canadian Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union during and shortly after World War II. While at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Fuchs was responsible for many significant theoretical calculations relating to the first nuclear weapons and, later, early models of the hydrogen bomb. After his conviction in 1950, he served nine years in prison in the United Kingdom and then moved to East Germany where he resumed his career as a physicist and scientific leader.

Franz Josef Strauss was a German politician. He was the long-time chairman of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) from 1961 until 1988, member of the federal cabinet in different positions between 1953 and 1969 and minister-president of the state of Bavaria from 1978 until 1988. Strauss is also credited as a co-founder of European aerospace conglomerate Airbus.

Valerie Jean Solanas was an American radical feminist and author best known for writing the SCUM Manifesto, which she self-published in 1967, and attempting to murder Andy Warhol in 1968.

Mildred Elizabeth Gillars, nicknamed "Axis Sally" along with Rita Zucca, was an American broadcaster employed by Nazi Germany to disseminate propaganda during World War II. Following her capture in post-war Berlin, she became the first woman to be convicted of treason against the United States. In March 1949, she was sentenced to ten to thirty years' imprisonment. She was released in 1961.

Joseph F. Ambrose was a World War I veteran from the U.S. state of Illinois who served with Company I, 140th Infantry, 35th Division, American Expeditionary Forces, from 1917 to 1919, becoming nationally known for his photo at the dedication day parade for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., at the age of 86. In this widely viewed and circulated United States Defense Audiovisual Agency photo, he was photographed wearing his Doughboy uniform, helmet and field equipment, for which he was known as "Doughboy Joe". In the photo, Ambrose carries the U.S. flag that had covered the casket of his son, Clement A. Ambrose, who was killed in the Korean War in 1951.

Karl Gerhart "Gert" Fröbe was a German film and stage actor. He is best known in English-speaking countries for his work as Auric Goldfinger in the James Bond film Goldfinger, as Peachum in The Threepenny Opera, as Baron Bomburst in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, as Hotzenplotz in Der Räuber Hotzenplotz, General Dietrich von Choltitz in Is Paris Burning? and Colonel Manfred von Holstein in Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines.

Chiang Ching-kuo was a Chinese-Taiwanese politician. The eldest and only biological son of former president Chiang Kai-shek, he held numerous posts in the government of the Republic of China. He served as Premier of the Republic of China between 1972 and 1978, and was the President of the Republic of China from 1978 until his death in 1988.