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