List of Famous people who died in 2011

John Jacob "Jay" Rhodes III was a Republican Representative from Arizona's 1st congressional district.

Robert Shapiro was professor emeritus of chemistry at New York University. He is best known for his work on the origin of life, having written two books on the topic: Origins, a Skeptic’s Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth (1986) and Planetary Dreams (1999). He opposed the RNA world hypothesis, and held that the spontaneous emergence of a molecule as complicated as RNA is highly unlikely. Instead, he proposed that life arose from some self-sustaining and compartmentalized reaction of simple molecules: "metabolism first" instead of "RNA first". This reaction would have to be able to reproduce and evolve, eventually leading to RNA. He claimed that in this view life is a normal consequence of the laws of nature and potentially quite common in the universe.

Alvaro Mancori (1923–2011) was an Italian cinematographer. He also directed two films, and acted as producer on several others.

Aloysius Matthew Ambrozic was a Roman Catholic cardinal and Archbishop of Toronto. He was made a cardinal on 21 February 1998.

Sir Filoimea Telito was a political and religious figure from the Pacific nation of Tuvalu. He was born on Vaitupu where he attended Elisefou primary school. He later attended King George V Secondary School in Tarawa, Kiribati.

René Audet was a Canadian bishop of the Roman Catholic Church.

Juliano Mer-Khamis was an Israeli/Palestinian actor, director, filmmaker, and political activist of Jewish and Palestinian Eastern Orthodox Christian parentage. On 4 April 2011, he was assassinated by a masked gunman in the Palestinian city of Jenin, where he had established The Freedom Theatre.

Ira Cohen was an American poet, publisher, photographer and filmmaker. Cohen lived in Morocco and in New York City in the 1960s, he was in Kathmandu in the 1970s and traveled the world in the 1980s, before returning to New York, where he spent the rest of his life. Cohen died of kidney failure on April 25, 2011. Ira Cohen's literary archive now resides at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Clifford Robert Olson Jr. was a convicted Canadian serial killer who confessed to murdering 11 children and young adults between the ages of 9 and 18 in the early 1980s. Olson scored 38/40 on the Psychopathy Checklist according to forensic psychiatrist Stanley Semrau, who interviewed Olson at length in prison.