Famous People Who Died Today

Tecumseh was a Shawnee chief, diplomat, orator, and warrior. He is best known for promoting resistance to the United States' expansion onto Native American lands. He also promoted tribal unity and is credited with forming a Native American confederacy. He died trying to unite Native Americans and is considered an iconic folk hero in Canadian, Indigenous, and American history.

Emilie Schindler is best remembered as the wife of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved over a thousand Jews from the Nazis by employing them at his factory and later inspired the iconic Steven Spielberg movie Schindler's List. She later fled to Argentina with Oskar but was abandoned by him.

Polish Catholic nun Faustyna Kowalska is remembered for her diary, which recorded her multiple visions of Jesus and was later published. She later got an artist to paint the Image of the Divine Mercy, based on her visions. Known as the Apostle of Divine Mercy, she was canonized as a saint in 2000.

Chantal Akerman was a Belgian screenwriter, film director, and artist. she also served at the City College of New York as a film professor. Best known for her work in the 1975 arthouse film Jeanne Dielman, which was described as a masterpiece by The New York Times, Chantal Akerman had a profound influence on avant-garde cinema.  

Born in New Zealand, to a doctor father from Dublin, Maurice grew up to be a Nobel Prize-winning biophysicist. His X-ray diffraction studies of DNA helped James D. Watson and Francis Crick, his fellow Nobel laureates, ascertain the DNA structure. He was also part of the Manhattan Project.

Apart from being the father of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Keith Murdoch was a talented journalist in his own right, who gained fame as a political correspondent for the Sydney Sun. He is also known for carrying the controversial Gallipoli letter to London. He later led The Herald and Weekly Times.

British army general Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess Cornwallis is best remembered for his stints as the governor-general of India and the viceroy of Ireland. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, he later started his army career with the Seven Years’ War. He was also part of the American War of Independence.

Henning Mankell was a Swedish dramatist, children's author, and crime writer. He is best reemembered for penning a series of mystery novels which featured the popular character, Inspector Kurt Wallander. Henning Mankell is also remembered for highlighting injustices in Sweden and social inequality issues through his plays and books. He was a recipient of many awards like the Gumshoe Award.

Andrea de Cesaris, who had represented multiple Formula One teams, went down in history as the racer with the most Grand Prix starts without a single win. Post-retirement, he worked as a currency broker. He made headlines again when he dies in a motorcycle accident on a Rome highway.

Civil rights activist and Baptist minister Fred Shuttlesworth had also co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, along with others such as Martin Luther King, Jr. He also participated in the Freedom Rights and had been the target of a major assassination attempt by the Ku Klux Klan.

Karl Gordon Henize was a space scientist and astronaut who authored seventy papers on astronomy. He was posted at various observatories round the world. Later on, he joined NASA as scientist-astronaut and flew on space shuttle Challenger as a mission specialist.

Joker Arroyo was a Filipino statesman who served as a Senator of the Philippines from 2001 to 2013. His immense contributions to public service earned him various awards and honors. Joker Arroyo also made important contributions to the law profession.

Best known as part of the Swiss rock band Gotthard, Steve Lee was mostly a vocalist but was also skilled in the drums and the harmonica. He co-founded the band Krak, which eventually became Gotthard. He was killed in a freak motorcycle accident while on a biking trip in Nevada with his friends.

Thomas Mitchell was a Scottish-born Australian explorer and surveyor of Southeastern Australia. He is best remembered for his service as the Surveyor-General of New South Wales from 1828 until his death on 5 October 1855. In 1839, Thomas Mitchell was knighted for his immense contribution to the surveying of Australia.

Lars Onsager was a Norwegian-born American theoretical physicist and physical chemist. He is best remembered for his research at the Brown University which produced the Onsager reciprocal relations. This set of equations which he first published in 1929 earned Lars Onsager the 1968 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

A pioneering journalist, Ramnath Goenka was the man behind the launch of the Indian Express group. His first job was that of a Free Press Journal despatch vendor. Known for his fiery journalism against Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, he had also been part of India’s first Constituent Assembly.

University of California, Berkeley professor, biochemist, and geneticist Bruce Ames is largely known for his invention of the Ames test, used to test the ability of chemicals to cause mutations, and his studies on cancer and ageing. The Cornell and Caltech alumnus has been associated with the NIAMD, too.

Aleksey Stepanovich Khomyakov was a Russian philosopher, theologian, poet, and amateur artist. Apart from co-founding an intellectual movement called the Slavophile movement, Khomyakov went on to serve as one of the most distinguished theoreticians of the movement.