Paris — From Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny to British actress Maggie Smith and US music titan Quincy Jones, here are some of 2024’s most notable deaths.
February
– 4: HAGE GEINGOB, Namibia’s President and its first post-independence prime minister, aged 82
– 9: ROBERT BADINTER, former French justice minister who ended capital punishment in 1981, 95
– 16: ALEXEI NAVALNY, the top opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin, in prison aged 47, after over three years behind bars
– 29: ALI HASSAN MWINYI, former Tanzanian president, who introduced multi-party democracy, 98
March
– 1: IRIS APFEL, New York fashion celebrity known as the “geriatric starlet”, 102
– 1: AKIRA TORIYAMA, creator of Japan’s “Dragon Ball” comics and anime cartoons, 68
April
– 2: MARYSE CONDE, French writer, chronicler of the lives of the descendants of Africans taken as slaves to the Caribbean, 90
– 8: PETER HIGGS, British physicist whose theory of a mass-giving particle — the so-called Higgs boson — jointly earned him the Nobel Physics Prize, 94
– 10: O.J. SIMPSON, ex-American football star acquitted in 1995 following the televised “Trial of the Century” of the murder of his ex-wife and her male friend. A 1997 civil trial found Simpson liable and he then served nearly nine years in prison for a bungled 2007 armed robbery, 76
– 30: PAUL AUSTER, American novelist who wrote “The New York Trilogy”, 77
May
– 9: ROGER CORMAN, American B-movie filmmaker, 98
– 13: ALICE MUNRO, Nobel Prize-winning Canadian author known for her mastery of the short story, 92
June
– 5: AKIRA ENDO, Japanese biochemist who discovered cholesterol-lowering statins, 90
– 11: FRANCOISE HARDY, French singer who shot to international stardom in the 1960s, 80
– 18: ANOUK AIMEE, French film star of Claude Lelouch’s box-office smash “A Man and A Woman”, 92
– 20: DONALD SUTHERLAND, Canadian actor of “The Dirty Dozen” and “The Hunger Games”, 88
July
– 1: ISMAIL KADARE, Albanian novelist whose novels defied the communist dictator Enver Hoxha, 88
– 13: SHANNEN DOHERTY, US actress of the high school drama series “Beverly Hills 90210”, 53
– 19: NGUYEN PHU TRONG, general secretary of Vietnam’s Communist Party, considered the country’s top leader, 80
– 27: EDNA O’BRIEN, radical Irish writer whose first novel “The Country Girls” was burned and banned in her native country, 93
– 31: ISMAIL HANIYEH, Hamas political chief, killed in Tehran in an attack blamed on Israel, 62
August
– 14: GENA ROWLANDS, award-winning US actress and muse of her first husband, director John Cassavetes, 94
– 18: ALAIN DELON, French film legend known for his roles in classics “Purple Noon” (1960) and “Le Samurai” (1967), 88
September
– 11: ALBERTO FUJIMORI, Peru’s former president, who spent 16 years in prison for crimes against humanity, 86
– 27: MAGGIE SMITH, Britain’s double Oscar-winning actress, 89
– 27: HASSAN NASRALLAH, Hezbollah chief, killed in an Israeli strike, 64
– 28: KRIS KRISTOFFERSON, US country music legend, 88
October
– 9: RATAN TATA, Indian industrialist, head of the Tata Group, 86
– 10: ETHEL KENNEDY, human rights activist and widow of assassinated US politician Robert F. Kennedy, 96
– 16: LIAM PAYNE, former member of the best-selling boys band One Direction, having fallen from the third floor of a Buenos Aires hotel, 31
– 16: YAHYA SINWAR, Hamas political chief, killed by Israeli troops, 61
– 20: FETHULLAH GULEN, Muslim cleric and bitter enemy of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in exile in the United States, 83
November
– 3: QUINCY JONES, US music industry titan, 91
– 24: BREYTEN BREYTENBACH, South Africa’s award-winning writer and anti-apartheid activist, 85
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Source: AFP
Picture: X/@dariusrucker
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