List of Famous people who died in 1991

Ralph Bates was an English film and television actor, known for his role in the British sitcom Dear John and the hugely successful TV drama Poldark.

Klaas Bruinsma was a major Dutch drug lord. He was shot dead on 27 June 1991 by organized crime member and former police officer Martin Hoogland. He was known as "De Lange" and also as "De Dominee" because of his black clothing and his habit of lecturing others.

Curt Bois was a German actor with a career spanning over 80 years. He is best remembered for his performances as the pickpocket in Casablanca (1942) and the poet Homer in Wings of Desire (1987).

Ernst Heinrich Krenek was an Austrian, later American, composer of Czech origin. He explored atonality and other modern styles and wrote a number of books, including Music Here and Now (1939), a study of Johannes Ockeghem (1953), and Horizons Circled: Reflections on my Music (1974). Krenek wrote two pieces using the pseudonym Thornton Winsloe.

Ronald Richter (1909–1991) was an Austrian-born German, later became Argentine citizen, a scientist who became infamous in connection with the Argentine Huemul Project and the National Atomic Energy Commission (CNEA). The project was intended to generate energy from nuclear fusion in the 1950s, during the presidency of Juan Perón. Richter's project would deliver—according to Perón's 1951 announcements—cheap energy in half-litre and one-litre containers.

Beatrice Joan Caulfield was an American actress and model. After being discovered by Broadway producers, she began a stage career in 1943 that eventually led to signing as an actress with Paramount Pictures. In the opinion of Ephraim Katz in The Film Encyclopedia, published in 1979, "For several years she was among Paramount's top stars, radiating delicate femininity and demure beauty but rarely much else."

Ingeborg Viola Öllegård Wellton-Hell was a Swedish actress. She was married to actor Erik Hell from 1960 until his death in 1973.

Jiří Mucha was a Czech journalist, writer, screenwriter, author of autobiographical novels and studies of the works of his father, the Art Nouveau painter Alphonse Mucha.

Hitoshi Igarashi was a Japanese scholar of Arabic and Persian literature and history and the Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses. He was murdered in the wake of fatwas issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran – who, by the time of Igarashi's murder, had died – calling for the death of the book's author and "those involved in its publication."

Curt Heinrich Dathe was a German zoologist best known for being the director of the Berlin Zoo where he helped in popularizing animal conservation and worked on the successful captive breeding of a range of animals including numerous species of birds. As a youth he joined to become a member of the NDSAP, the Nazi party, and regretted it in a posthumous biography. He received the national prize of the GDR in 1965. A school in Berlin is named after him.