Notable deaths of 2024, so far (2024)

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Jan. 4, age 100 | British actress, who became a film star in the late 1940s playing a flirty mermaid named Miranda, portrayed a singing suffragist in the Disney musical “Mary Poppins” and won a Tony Award in the musical “A Little Night Music,” where she introduced Stephen Sondheim’s standard “Send in the Clowns.” | Read more

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Jan. 5, age 86 | Journalist, who rose from copy boy to top editor at the New York Times, where he distinguished himself as the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about apartheid South Africa and where he sought to carry the bedrock values of journalism into the digital age. | Read more

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Jan. 5, age 92 | Soccer player, who won two World Cups as a player, one as a coach and another as an assistant coach for Brazil. He was the first person to win the World Cup both as a player and a manager, as well as the only person to win four World Cup titles in various roles. (Pictured, center) | Read more

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Jan. 7, age 78 | Cultural critic, whose essays for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books — by turns stylish, erudite, droll and self-effacing — established her as an indispensable guide to modern dance and literature. | Read more

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Jan. 13, age 99 | Actress best remembered for playing Trixie Norton, the disapproving Brooklynite wife of a sewer worker, on the influential 1950s variety-show skit and sitcom “The Honeymooners.” (Pictured, right) | Read more

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Jan. 13, age 79 | Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic for The Washington Post, who brought incisive and barbed wit to coverage of the small screen and chronicled the medium as an increasingly powerful cultural force, for better and worse. | Read more

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Jan. 13, age 83 | Author and scholar, who used her experiences in French colonial Algeria as starting points for studies into the struggles and aspirations of women across the Muslim world, including her stance decrying the traditions of Islamic coverings such as headscarves. | Read more

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Jan. 19, age 81 | Longtime advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, who co-founded the first national organization for Black lesbians and gays and coordinated logistics for the first national LGBTQ+ march on Washington. (Pictured, left) | Read more

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Jan. 19, age 75 | Her yearning vocals and street-smart vibe as lead singer of the Shangri-Las brought an edgier style to the girl-group era of the 1960s with such hits as “Leader of the Pack,” and she then mostly left music for decades until returning with a solo album in her 50s. (Pictured, center) | Read more

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Jan. 22, age 62 | Younger son of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King, who worked to preserve his father’s legacy. | Read more

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Jan. 22, age 90 | Physicist, who fled Nazi Germany in childhood, settled in the United States and in 1978 shared the Nobel Prize in physics for helping find vital early evidence supporting the big-bang theory of the creation of the universe. (Pictured, right) | Read more

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Jan. 23, age 91 | Newsman who spent 22 years anchoring the CBS-TV staple “Sunday Morning” and decades as a radio commentator, and who carved a distinct place for himself in broadcasting by occasionally presenting the news in wry doggerel. | Read more

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Jan. 23, age 93 | Journalist and historian who unlocked the hidden world of cryptology in his best-selling 1967 book “The Codebreakers” and became a preeminent scholar of signals intelligence, revered even among the keepers of the secrets he revealed. | Read more

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Jan. 24, age 89 | Author, literature professor and member of the Kiowa Indian tribe, who became the first Native American to win a Pulitzer Prize — for his 1968 debut novel, “House Made of Dawn” — and helped inspire a flowering of contemporary Native American literature. | Read more

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Jan. 30, age 91 | Vivacious Broadway musical star, who originated roles in “West Side Story,” “Bye Bye Birdie,” “Chicago” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” won two competitive Tony Awards and became one of the most honored Latina entertainers of her generation. (Pictured, left) | Read more

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Jan. 30, age 90 | Former U.S. senator, who became the first female senator to represent Missouri after she was appointed to replace her husband following his death in a plane crash. | Read more

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Jan. 30, age 67 | Dancer, singer, actor and choreographer, who urged audiences to “Ease on Down the Road” as the Scarecrow in Broadway’s “The Wiz” and who later won three Tony Awards while performing acrobatic leaps, percussive taps and 190-degree kicks across the stage and screen. (Pictured, right) | Read more

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Jan. 30, age 88 | National Book Award-winning author, who channeled the people and places of the American South in wry and poignant prose, populating her novels and stories with independent-minded women who — like the author herself — resisted being forced into traditional roles as demure debutantes, wives and mothers. | Read more

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Feb. 1, age 76 | Former NFL linebacker turned muscle-flexing actor in action fare, memorably as nemesis-turned-ally Apollo Creed in the “Rocky” franchise. (Pictured, right) | Read more

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Feb. 2, age 75 | American soprano, who had recently established herself as an opera singer in real life when she was cast by a French director to play one on-screen in the 1981 movie “Diva,” a cult film that lodged her in the memory of generations of art house audiences. | Read more

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Feb. 4, age 45 | Disability rights activist, who was paralyzed from the neck down in an accident at age 11, graduated from Harvard University and became a professor and advocate for people with disabilities. | Read more

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Feb. 5, age 62 | Toby Keith, a former rodeo hand, oil rigger and semipro football player who became a rowdy king of country music, singing patriotic anthems, wry drinking songs and propulsive odes to cowboy culture that collectively sold more than 40 million records. | Read more | See more photos

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Feb. 6, age 88 | Shaggy-haired, high-voltage Japanese maestro, who served as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for almost 30 years and was among the first Asian conductors to win world renown leading a classical orchestra. | Read more

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Feb. 6, age 102 | British pathologist, whose chance attendance at a lecture on childhood tumors in Africa began years of scientific sleuthing that led to the discovery of the ultra-common Epstein-Barr virus and opened expansive research into its viral links to cancers and other chronic ailments. | Read more

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Feb. 10, age 96 | He helped create the on-the-go breakfast as an inventor of Pop-Tarts, leading the Michigan baking team that developed an unpretentious, toaster-friendly pastry with a fruity filling and ineffable space-age sweetness. | Read more

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Feb. 16, age 47 | Steely Russian lawyer, who exposed corruption, self-dealing and abuse of power by Russian President Vladimir Putin and his cronies, sustaining a popular challenge to Putin for more than a decade despite constant pressure from the authorities and a near-fatal poisoning. | Read more | See more photos

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Feb. 17, age 92 | Head coach, who, in 17 seasons, built the University of Maryland into a college basketball power with ACC and NIT titles. | Read more

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Feb. 18, age 83 | Doe-eyed bon vivant, who first dazzled paparazzi as a teen bride of a playboy prince and who became an epitome of jet-set glamour and intrigue as a model in Paris, a movie temptress and a globe-trotting socialite who mingled with royalty, rogues and celebrities. | Read more

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Feb. 20, age 39 | She was born with HIV and spent nearly her entire life — ever since she was a young girl — as an advocate for HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention. | Read more

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Feb. 21, age 100 | Nobel Prize-winning physician, whose work on hormones produced by the brain helped lead to the development of the birth control pill and treatments for prostate and other cancers, and who engaged for decades in a famously scathing but productive scientific rivalry. | Read more

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Feb. 22, age 85 | The “first lady of the banjo,” who picked her way into bluegrass and country music history as a member of the Stoneman Family band and found wider fame as an irascible performer on “Hee Haw,” the down-home variety show. | Read more

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Feb. 23, age 98 | Italian fencer whose elegant wielding of the foil earned her a gold medal at the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki and an enduring reputation as a grande dame of her sport. | Read more

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Feb. 27, age 76 | Black-clad stand-up comic, who mined guilt, anxiety and neurosis for laughs — naming some of his cable specials “I’m in Pain,” “I’m Exhausted” and “I’m Doomed” — and played a semi-fictionalized version of himself on HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” | Read more

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Feb. 28, age 102 | Holocaust survivor, who endured years in Nazi concentration camps and two death marches before settling in Skokie, Ill., where he helped rally opposition to a planned neo-Nazi demonstration in the late 1970s that produced one of the most explosive cases in First Amendment law. | Read more

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March 1, age 102 | New York textile designer, socialite and self-described “geriatric starlet,” who became an unlikely fashion celebrity in her 80s for her outré style. | Read more | See more photos

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March 3, age 101 | Creator of ’50s “poodle skirt’” fad, a simple idea for the Christmas party outfit that turned into one of the defining looks of an era. | Read more

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March 8, age 89 | Former Air Force flier, who in the 1960s became the first Black pilot for a major U.S. passenger airline after battles by others to enter the industry, including a landmark anti-discrimination claim backed by the Supreme Court. | Read more

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March 11, age 81 | Dorie Ladner, who joined the civil rights movement as a teenager in Mississippi, braving gunfire, tear gas, police dogs and Ku Klux Klansmen in an undaunted campaign for racial equality. | Read more

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March 11, age 78 | He was stricken with polio at age 6, earned a law degree and wrote a 2020 memoir about his life using the iron lung chamber to help him breathe. | Read more

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March 11, age 77 | Political strategist, who helped move gay rights to the center of American politics and put his long friendship with Bill Clinton on the line over the president’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy barring gay people from serving openly in the military. | Read more

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March 15, age 98 | Holocaust refugee, who joined resistance, fled her native Austria and made her way to Italy, where as a teen she helped secure supplies for an operation that produced false documents for Jewish refugees. | Read more

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March 16, age 96 | Producer, who spent four decades as a behind-the-scenes power of the NBC weekly public affairs show “Meet the Press,” rising to executive producer of the program and helping secure guests spanning the ideological spectrum from Fidel Castro to Ross Perot. | Read more

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March 18, age 82 | English heiress, and debutante at a 1958 Buckingham Palace ball, who in 1974 was masterminding plots for the Irish Republican Army. | Read more

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March 20, age 95 | Tailor to presidents and stars, who, unbeknownst to many of his celebrity clients, learned his craft at Auschwitz and who came to America as his family’s sole survivor of the Holocaust. |Read more

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March 23, age 94 | Baltimore lawyer, who won hundreds of millions of dollars for workers injured by exposure to asbestos, then became wider known to the public as the combative chief owner of the Baltimore Orioles for three decades. | Read more

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March 27, age 82 | A doggedly independent four-term U.S. senator from Connecticut who was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2000, becoming the first Jewish candidate on the national ticket of a major party. (Pictured, right) | Read more | See more photos

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March 29, age 87 | Actor, who brought authority to hundreds of screen roles, winning an Oscar as a Marine drill instructor in “An Officer and a Gentleman” and an Emmy Award as a wise, older guide to the enslaved Kunta Kinte in the groundbreaking miniseries “Roots.” (Pictured, left) | Read more | See more photos

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April 1, age 102 | Navy lieutenant commander and the last living survivor of the USS Arizona battleship, which exploded and sank during the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. | Read more

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April 10, age 76 | Football superstar, who became a symbol of domestic violence and racial division after he was found not guilty of murdering his ex-wife and her friend in a trial that riveted the nation and had legal and cultural repercussions for years afterward. | Read more | See more photos

Photo editing by Stephen Cook, Jennifer Beeson Gregory and Dee Swann. Copy editing by Shibani Shah.