List of Famous people who died in 2009

Henry John Surtees was a British racing driver and the son of John Surtees.

Gaston Lenôtre was a French pastry chef known as a possible creator of the opera cake, the founder of "Lenôtre" a culinary empire; whose brand includes restaurants, catering services, retail concerns and cooking schools, and one of the three founders with Paul Bocuse and Roger Verge of Les Chefs de France at EPCOT in Orlando, Florida.

André Falcon was a French film actor. He appeared in more than one hundred films from 1954 to 2008.

Izaac Hindom was an Indonesian bureaucrat and politician who served as the governor of Irian Jaya from 1982 until 1988.

Marcos Moshinsky Borodiansky was a Mexican physicist of Ukrainian-Jewish origin whose work in the field of elementary particles won him the Prince of Asturias Prize for Scientific and Technical Investigation in 1988 and the UNESCO Science Prize in 1997.

Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg, ForMemRS was a Soviet and Russian theoretical physicist, astrophysicist, Nobel laureate, a member of the Soviet and Russian Academies of Sciences and one of the fathers of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. He was the successor to Igor Tamm as head of the Department of Theoretical Physics of the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (FIAN), and an outspoken atheist.

Irving Kristol was an American journalist who was dubbed the "godfather of neoconservatism". As a founder, editor, and contributor to various magazines, he played an influential role in the intellectual and political culture of the last half of the twentieth century. After his death, he was described by The Daily Telegraph as being "perhaps the most consequential public intellectual of the latter half of the [twentieth] century".

Leonidas Vargas Vargas, also known as "El Viejo" and "The King of Caqueta", was a Colombian drug lord who headed a multimillion-dollar cocaine empire associated with the Medellín Cartel and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Vargas became one of the richest drug lords in Colombia, as well as one of the most wanted by police.

Betsy Blair was an American actress of film and stage, long based in London.

Maria Curcio was an Italian classical pianist who became a sought-after teacher. Her students included Barry Douglas, Ignat Solzhenitsyn, Martha Argerich, Evelyne Brancart, Radu Lupu, Dame Mitsuko Uchida, Myung-Whun Chung, Leon Fleisher, Rafael Orozco, Christopher Elton, Hilary Coates, Simone Dinnerstein, Massimiliano Mainolfi, Matthew Schellhorn and Geoffrey Tozer. She was the last student of Artur Schnabel and she passed on his teachings to her own students.