List of Famous people who died in 2011

Lionel Edmund Rose MBE was an Australian bantamweight boxer, the first Indigenous Australian to win a world title. He later became the first Indigenous Australian to be named Australian of the Year.

Lyudmila Markovna Gurchenko, was a popular Soviet and Russian actress, singer and entertainer. People's Artist of the USSR (1983).

Donald Neilson, alias the "Black Panther", was a British armed robber, kidnapper and murderer. He murdered three men during robberies of sub-post offices between 1971 and 1974, and murdered kidnap victim Lesley Whittle, an heiress from Highley, Shropshire, in January 1975. He was apprehended later that year, and sentenced to life imprisonment in July 1976, remaining in prison until his death in 2011.

Har Gobind Khorana was an Indian American biochemist. While on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley for research that showed the order of nucleotides in nucleic acids, which carry the genetic code of the cell and control the cell's synthesis of proteins. Khorana and Nirenberg were also awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in the same year.

Kathy Kirby was an English singer, reportedly the highest-paid female singer of her generation. She is best known for her cover version of Doris Day's "Secret Love" and for representing the United Kingdom in the 1965 Eurovision Song Contest where she finished in second place. Her physical appearance often drew comparisons with Marilyn Monroe. Her popularity peaked in the 1960s, when she was one of the best-known and most-recognised personalities in British show business.

Peter Michael Falk was an American actor and comedian, known for his role as Lieutenant Columbo in the long-running television series Columbo (1968–2003), for which he won four Primetime Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe Award (1973). He first starred as Columbo in two 90-minute TV pilots; the first with Gene Barry in 1968 and the second with Lee Grant in 1971. The show then aired as part of The NBC Mystery Movie series from 1971 to 1978, and again on ABC from 1989 to 2003.

Witta Pohl was a German actress.

Mark Anthony Stroman was an American white supremacist and spree killer who was convicted and executed for a shooting spree in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. During the shooting spree in 2001, Stroman killed two people and injured a third. Stroman claimed he carried out the shooting spree in revenge for the 9/11 attacks. He specifically targeted Arabs or people who looked "of Muslim descent", but all his victims were from South Asia.

Takashi Nagase was a Japanese military interpreter during World War II. He worked for the Kempeitai at the construction of the Burma Railway in Thailand, and spent most of his later life as an activist for post-war reconciliation and against Japanese militarism. He made over a hundred visits to Thailand, and from the 1970s, arranged several meetings between former Allied prisoners of wars and their Japanese captors, in efforts to promote peace and understanding. In 1993, he met and reconciled with British former POW Eric Lomax—in whose torture sessions Nagase had been involved—an encounter retold in Lomax's 1995 autobiography The Railway Man.

Maria-Hélène Schneider, known as Maria Schneider, was a French actress. In 1972 at the age of nineteen she starred opposite Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris, but was traumatized by a rape scene and hounded by unsavoury publicity she subsequently declined to appear nude in roles for even the most prestigious directors. Although Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger showcased her abilities, a reputation for walking out of films mid-production resulted in her becoming unwelcomed in the industry. An incautious attitude to drugs and their toll on her mental health made what should have been banner years for Schneider increasingly chaotic. However, she re-established stability in her personal and professional life in the early 1980s, and became an advocate for equality and improving the conditions actresses worked under. She continued acting in film and TV until a few years before she died in 2011 after a long illness.