List of Famous people who died in 2003

Júlio Botelho, also known as Julinho was a Brazilian football player. He was primarily a right winger. Known for his dribbling ability and powerful shot, Julinho was one of the greatest wingers in football history. He was selected by Eric Batty in the World Soccer Magazine world XI in 1960.

Sir Oswald Victor Cheung was a barrister in Hong Kong, known as the "doyen of the bar".

Ying Ruocheng was a Chinese actor, director, playwright and vice minister of culture from 1986 to 1990. He first came to the attention of Western audiences for his portrayal of Kublai Khan in the 1982 miniseries Marco Polo. He is best known for playing the part of the governor of the detention camp in the Bernardo Bertolucci's film The Last Emperor, and the role of the Tibetan Buddhist Lama Norbu in Little Buddha. He is also well known as a theater translator, director, and actor for the Beijing People's Art Theatre, particularly for his role as Pockmark Liu in Lao She's masterpiece "Teahouse" and as Willy Loman in "Death of a Salesman" in 1983, directed by Arthur Miller.

Mhamed Yazid was an Algerian independence activist and politician. He joined the nationalist Parti du Peuple Algérien (PPA) in 1942, and later, after moving to Paris, France for university studies, joined its successor organization, the MTLD, where he became a member of the central committee. He was arrested in 1948 and sentenced to two years of prison for "carrying suspicious documents". He later led hunger strikes in prison.

Laurel Blair Clark was a NASA astronaut, medical doctor, United States Navy Captain, and Space Shuttle mission specialist. Clark died along with her six fellow crew members in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. She was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.

Abdul Halim Moussa was an Egyptian police major general and interior minister who was in office from 1990 to 1993.

Hans Hermann Fränkel, usually Anglicized to Hans Frankel, was a German-American sinologist noted for his studies of Chinese poetry and literature and his 25-year tenure as professor of Chinese at Yale University.

Saifuddin Azizi, also known as Seypidin Azizi, Saif al-Dīn ʿAzīz, Saifuding Aizezi and Saifuding, was the first chairman of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China.