List of Famous people who died in 2003

Robert R. Benton was an American set decorator. He was nominated for four Academy Awards in the category Best Art Direction.

Maxime Brunfaut (1909–2003) was a Belgian architect.

Theodore Marcus Edwards was an American jazz tenor saxophonist.

François Boyer was a French screenwriter. He achieved considerable success with his first attempt at screenwriting, Forbidden Games (1952). Initially, he found no studio interested in his work, so he redesigned the screenplay as a novel and published it in 1947 under the title The Secret Game. Although the novel achieved little or no success in its native country, it became a huge commercial success in America. All of a sudden, Boyer's novel was a hot property, so director René Clément, in conjunction with two writers Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, helped turn it into a screenplay. While Boyer receives story credit for the film, little is known of how much of his own screenplay made it to the screen. The film was a huge international success, and won an Honorary Oscar for the best foreign language film of its year.

Blas Fajardo Ople was a Filipino journalist and politician who held several high-ranking positions in the executive and legislative branches of the Philippine government, including as Senate President from 1999 to 2000, and as Secretary of Foreign Affairs from 2002 until his death. Perceived as a leftist-nationalist at the onset of his career in public service, Ople was, in his final years, a vocal supporter for allowing a limited United States military presence in the Philippines, and for American initiatives in the War on Terror including the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.