Famous People Who Died Today

Carroll O'Connor was an American actor, director, and producer. In a TV career that spanned 40 years, O'Connor popularized several fictional characters, including Archie Bunker from the sitcom All in the Family, for which he received four Emmy Awards. In 1996, he was ranked 38th on the 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time list published by TV Guide.

John Smith was an English explorer, soldier, colonial governor, author, and Admiral of New England. In the early-17th century, Smith played a major role in the establishment of the first indissoluble English settlement in America, which came to be known as the English colony at Jamestown. Apart from helping Jamestown survive various challenges, Smith's leadership also helped the colony flourish.

Best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning column in The Washington Post, Fox News commentator and political expert Charles Krauthammer was also a qualified psychiatrist. He was rendered paralyzed from the waist down at 22, after an accident while studying medicine at Harvard, but completed his degree nevertheless.

Sukarno was an Indonesian politician who played a major role in the Indonesian struggle for independence. An important leader of the country's nationalist movement, Sukarno declared Indonesian independence from the Dutch Empire and became Indonesia's first president in 1945. He was successful in resisting Dutch re-colonization efforts and went on to serve as the Indonesian president until 1967.

While he grew up listening to Russian folk songs and church music, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov later joined the navy with his brother. One of the legendary Russian composers known as The Mighty Handful, he is remembered for his pieces such as Flight of the Bumblebee from the opera Tsar Saltan.

Italian-American chef Ettore Boiardi is remembered for revolutionizing the culinary industry with his food brand Chef Boyardee, which made a variety of Italian food products, such as sauces and spaghetti, available to Americans for the first time. He even supplied food to the Allied soldiers during World War II.

Once a governess of the four daughters of the affluent Suttner family, Bertha von Suttner later married the sisters’ elder brother, Baron Arthur Gundaccar von Suttner. The Austrian novelist was known for her peace activism, which made her the first female to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Football player and coach Frank Leahy is best remembered for his stint as a coach at the University of Notre Dame and Boston College. He led Notre Dame to four national championship wins. Named to the College Football Hall of Fame, he also served as a sports columnist and a TV commentator.

Major Taylor was a professional cyclist who set many world records between 1898 and 1899. In 1899, he became the first African American to win the sprint event at the world track championships and only the second black athlete to emerge victorious in a world championship irrespective of the sport.

Johannes Stark was a German physicist who discovered the phenomenon that came to be known as the Stark effect. For this work, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1919. A supporter of Adolf Hitler, he was a main figure in the anti-Semitic Deutsche Physik movement. He was found guilty by a denazification court in 1947.

Assi Rahbani, part of the Lebanese composer duo The Rahbani Brothers, which also had his brother Mansour Rahbani, previously worked with Near East Radio. He later mostly composed music for his singer wife Nouhad Haddad, better known as Fairuz. The husband-wife duo also appeared in movies such as The Exile.

Shintaro Katsu was a Japanese singer, actor, and filmmaker. He is remembered for playing important roles in popular film series like the Akumyo series and the Zatoichi series. Katsu's personal life, which included arrests in 1978, 1990, and 1992 for possession of drugs, overshadowed his professional achievements. Fujitora, a character from the manga series One Piece, is based on Katsu.

The leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, Tage Fritjof Erlander was sworn in as the Prime Minister of Sweden in 1946 and continued in the office for the next 23 years (1969). His tenure, which is one of the longest in any democracy, was marked by increase in social-welfare reforms like universal health insurance, pension additions and educational reforms.

British racing-driver Piers Courage began his Formula One World Championship career during the 1967 South African Grand Prix. He competed for Lotus, BRM, Brabham and De Tomaso, scored 20 championship-points and garnered two podium-finishes participating in 29 World Championship Formula One Grands Prix. His life was tragically cut-short after he met with a fatal-accident during the 1970 Dutch Grand Prix. 

Anders Jonas Ångström was a Swedish physicist best remembered for co-founding the science of spectroscopy. He is also renowned for his studies of terrestrial magnetism, astrophysics, heat transfer, and the aurora borealis. In 1850, Anders Jonas Ångström was made a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.  

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson was a Scottish mathematician, biologist, and classics scholar. A pioneer of mathematical biology, Thompson is best remembered for writing a book titled On Growth and Form, which is widely admired by architects, anthropologists, and biologists among others. Over the course of his illustrious career, D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson received several prestigious awards like the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal.

Peder Mørk Mønsted was a Danish realist painter best remembered for his portrayal of landscapes in a realistic style. Some of his favorite motifs were forests, still water, and snowy winter landscapes. A habitual traveler, Peder Mørk Mønsted presented his paintings at several international exhibitions. Today, many of his works are being treasured by private collectors around the world.

Inigo Jones was a British architect who played an important role in the early modern period. Regarded as England's first significant architect in the said period, Jones was the first person to make use of Vitruvian rules of symmetry and proportion in his buildings. He was also the first architect to introduce the architecture of the Italian Renaissance to Britain.

French chemist Louis-Jacques Thenard was born to a farm worker and was educated on scholarships. He grew up to teach chemistry and also joined the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences as a foreign member. He is remembered for his discovery of hydrogen peroxide and Thenard’s blue, used in coloring porcelain.

Award-winning Bangladeshi poet Rudra Mohammad Shahidullah began writing poems early in his life, publishing his first two collections long before he acquired his master’s degree from the University of Dhaka. Remembered for his revolutionary as well as romantic poems, he died of depression and substance abuse, leaving a suicide poem, Bhalo Achi Bhalo Theko, for his ex-wife Taslima Nasrin.

One of the most popular Aboriginal artists from Australia, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri was raised in the Australian bush and later often depicted the terrain in his paintings. Starting his career as a carver, he later became part of the Aboriginal Art Movement. Dreamings remains one of his best-known paintings.