Notable deaths of 2024

by Raphaëlle PICARD / Janet MCEVOY

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, France's former 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" manga 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 "Plein Soleil" (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

AFP British actress Maggie Smith died in September aged 89

- 27: MAGGIE SMITH, British actor, "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie", "Gosford Park", Harry Potter series: double Oscar-winner, 89

- 27: HASSAN NASRALLAH, Hezbollah chief, killed in an Israeli strike, 64

- 28: KRIS KRISTOFFERSON, US country music legend, actor, 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

AFPBritish boys band singer-songwriter Liam Payne, 31,died in October when he fell from the third floor of a Buenos Aires hotel

- 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 -

AFP Trailblazing musician, composer and producer Quincy Jones died in November aged 91

- 3: QUINCY JONES, Trailblazing US musician, arranger, band leader, composer and producer, 91

- 24: BREYTEN BREYTENBACH, South African award-winning writer and anti-apartheid activist, 85

- 28: PRINCE JOHNSON, former Liberian warlord, responsible for the gruesome 1990 killing of president Samuel Doe which plunged Liberia into two bloody civil wars, 72

- December -

- 17: MARISA PAREDES, Spanish actress who starred in six films by Pedro Almodovar, becoming known as "Almodovar's girl", 78