List of Famous people who died in 2004

Estée Lauder was an American businesswoman. She co-founded her eponymous cosmetics company with her husband, Joseph Lauter. Lauder was the only woman on Time magazine's 1998 list of the 20 most influential business geniuses of the 20th century.

Ota Šik was a Czech economist and politician. He was the man behind the New Economic Model and was one of the key figures in the Prague Spring.

Lucia Brown Berlin was an American short story writer. She had a small, devoted following, but did not reach a mass audience during her lifetime. She rose to sudden literary fame in 2015, eleven years after her death, with the publication of a volume of her selected stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women. It hit The New York Times bestseller list in its second week, and within a few weeks had outsold all her previous books combined.

Martha Carson, born Irene Amburgey, was an American gospel-country music singer most popular during the 1950s.

Tiziano Terzani was an Italian journalist and writer, best known for his extensive knowledge of 20th century East Asia and for being one of the very few western reporters to witness both the fall of Saigon to the hands of the Viet Cong and the fall of Phnom Penh at the hands of the Khmer Rouge in the mid-1970s.

David Mann was a California graphic artist whose paintings celebrated biker culture, and choppers. Called "the biker world's artist-in-residence," his images are ubiquitous in biker clubhouses and garages, on motorcycle gas tanks, tattoos, and on T-shirts and other memorabilia associated with biker culture. Choppers have been built based on the bikes first imagined in a David Mann painting.

Ibrahim Maraachli or Meraachli was a Lebanese television, radio and stage actor and comedian. He took part in a great number of plays on Lebanese television and stage for three decades. He was best known for Lebanese made TV series such as Al mouaallima wal oustaz, "Ibrahim Afandi" and "Captain Bob".

Sir John Robert Vane was a British pharmacologist who was instrumental in the understanding of how aspirin produces pain-relief and anti-inflammatory effects and his work led to new treatments for heart and blood vessel disease and introduction of ACE inhibitors. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1982 along with Sune Bergström and Bengt Samuelsson for "their discoveries concerning prostaglandins and related biologically active substances".

Robert Merle was a French novelist.

Maria de Lourdes Ruivo da Silva de Matos Pintasilgo was a Portuguese chemical engineer and politician. She was the first and to date only woman to serve as Prime Minister of Portugal, and the second woman to serve as Prime Minister in Western Europe, after Margaret Thatcher.