List of Famous people who died in 1989

Robert Michael Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits, and still-life images. His most controversial works documented and examined the homosexual male BDSM subculture of New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A 1989 exhibition of Mapplethorpe's work, titled Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, sparked a debate in the United States concerning both use of public funds for "obscene" artwork and the Constitutional limits of free speech in the United States.

John Daniel Matuszak was an American football defensive end in the National Football League who later became an actor.

Yasushi Akutagawa was a Japanese composer and conductor. He was born and raised in Tabata, Tokyo. His father was Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.

Charles-Marie Vanel was a French actor and director. During his 76-year film career, which began in 1912, he appeared in more than 200 films and worked with many prominent directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel, Jacques Feyder, and Henri-Georges Clouzot. He is perhaps best remembered for his role as a desperate truck driver in Clouzot's The Wages of Fear for which he received a Special Mention at the Cannes Film Festival in 1953.

Jackie Keith Whitley was an American country music singer. During his career, Whitley only recorded two albums but charted 12 singles on the Billboard country charts, and 7 more after his death.

Alfred Manuel Martin Jr., commonly called "Billy", was an American Major League Baseball second baseman and manager who, in addition to leading other teams, was five times the manager of the New York Yankees. First known as a scrappy infielder who made considerable contributions to the championship Yankee teams of the 1950s, he then built a reputation as a manager who would initially make bad teams good, before ultimately being fired amid dysfunction. In each of his stints with the Yankees he managed them to winning records before being fired by team owner George Steinbrenner or resigning under fire, usually amid a well-publicized scandal such as Martin's involvement in an alcohol-fueled fight.

Anatoly Yemelianovich Slivko was a Soviet serial killer, sexual predator, and necrophile. He was convicted of killing seven teenage boys in and around Nevinnomyssk, Stavropol Krai, Russian SFSR, between 1964 and 1985.

William Bradford Shockley Jr. was an American physicist and inventor. He was the manager of a research group at Bell Labs that included John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. The three scientists were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for "their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect".

Adolfo de Jesús Constanzo was a Cuban-American serial killer, drug dealer, and cult leader who led an infamous gang that was dubbed the Narcosatanists by the media. His cult members nicknamed him The Godfather. Constanzo led the cult with Sara Aldrete, whom followers nicknamed "The Godmother". The cult was involved in multiple ritualistic killings in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico, including the murder of Mark Kilroy, an American student killed in Matamoros in 1989.

Siegfried Wischnewski was a German stage and film actor.