List of Famous people who died in 2011

Michael Sarrazin was a Canadian film and television actor who found fame opposite Jane Fonda in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969).

Ralph Marvin Steinman was a Canadian physician and medical researcher at Rockefeller University, who in 1973 discovered and named dendritic cells while working as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Zanvil A. Cohn, also at Rockefeller University. Steinman was one of the recipients of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Friedrich A. Kittler was a literary scholar and a media theorist. His works relate to media, technology, and the military.

Moacyr Jaime Scliar was a Brazilian writer and physician. Most of his writing centers on issues of Jewish identity in the Diaspora and particularly on being Jewish in Brazil.

Archduke Felix of Austria was the last-surviving child of the last Austrian Emperor Charles I and a member of the House of Habsburg. He was a younger brother of former Crown Prince Otto of Austria, who predeceased Felix by two months.

Lynn Margulis was an American evolutionary theorist, biologist, science author, educator, and science popularizer, and was the primary modern proponent for the significance of symbiosis in evolution. Historian Jan Sapp has said that "Lynn Margulis's name is as synonymous with symbiosis as Charles Darwin's is with evolution." In particular, Margulis transformed and fundamentally framed current understanding of the evolution of cells with nuclei – an event Ernst Mayr called "perhaps the most important and dramatic event in the history of life" – by proposing it to have been the result of symbiotic mergers of bacteria. Margulis was also the co-developer of the Gaia hypothesis with the British chemist James Lovelock, proposing that the Earth functions as a single self-regulating system, and was the principal defender and promulgator of the five kingdom classification of Robert Whittaker.

William Denison McKinney was an American character actor. He played the sadistic mountain man in John Boorman's 1972 film Deliverance and performed in seven Clint Eastwood films, most notably as Captain Terrill, commander pursuing the last rebels to "hold out" against surrendering to the Union forces in The Outlaw Josey Wales.

Jorge Villamil Cordovez was a Colombian composer and songwriter born in El Cedral, a large coffee plantation near Neiva (Huila). He was one of the most prolific and important composers of Colombia and South America. Villamil's talent was evident when he learned to play Colombian tiple at 4 years of age. He was the youngest and only male of a family of 7.

Jean-Dominique de La Rochefoucauld was a French screenwriter and TV director.

Abdoulaye Seye was a Senegalese sprinter. He competed for France at the 1960 Olympics in the 100 m, 200 m and 4 × 100 m relay events and won a bronze medal in the 200 m. Although Senegal had received its independence from France two months ahead of the Olympics as part of the short-lived Mali Federation, in 1960 it still competed as part of France. Seye also won the 100 m gold medal at the 1959 Mediterranean Games.