Eartha Kitt
December 25, 2008
Kitt, whose saucy rendition of "Santa Baby" became a holiday pop music classic, died in Connecticut on Christmas Day.

Rev. James L. Bevel
December 19, 2008
Bevel was a leader in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, two of the stalwart organizations that led efforts in the 1960s to desegregate the South.

Conor Cruise O'Brien
December 18, 2008
Conor Cruise O'Brien, an Irish iconoclast who led several lives as a diplomat, government minister, author and newspaper editor, has died. He was 91.

W. Mark Felt Sr.
December 18, 2008
W. Mark Felt Sr., the associate director of the FBI during the Watergate scandal who, better known as "Deep Throat," became the most famous anonymous source in American history, died yesterday. He was 95.

Robin Toner
December 12, 2008
Robin Toner, 54, a veteran Washington correspondent for the New York Times and the first woman to become the newspaper's chief national political writer, died Dec. 12 at her home in Washington. She had colon cancer.

Bettie Page
December 11, 2008
Bettie Page, a legendary pinup girl whose photographs in the nude, in bondage and in naughty-but-nice poses appeared in men’s magazines and private stashes across America in the 1950s and set the stage for the sexual revolution of the rebellious ’60s, died Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 85.

Odetta
December 2, 2008
Odetta, the singer whose deep voice wove together the strongest songs of American folk music and the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She was 77.

Studs Terkel
October 31, 2008
Studs was a genius, a genius at getting the rest of us to talk and reflect and tell stories, at making sense of who we are, whence we came and where we’re headed.

Adrian Kantrowitz
November 14, 2008
Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz, the pioneering cardiovascular surgeon who performed the first U.S. heart transplant, developed a balloon-pumping device that has saved hundreds of thousands of lives and developed mechanical heart-assist devices, died of heart failure Friday in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was 90.

Florence S. Wald
November 14, 2008
Wald sparked a movement that grew from the first hospice program established in the United States in 1971 to more than 3,200 nationwide now, offering comfort, care and pain relief to patients in their final weeks and months and helping to ease the distress of families faced with the loss of loved ones.

Ronald M. Davis
November 6, 2008
Dr. Ronald M. Davis, a former president of the American Medical Association who campaigned against tobacco, alcohol, obesity, illicit drugs and unhealthy lifestyles in his career as a public health official, died Thursday at his home in East Lansing, Mich. He was 52. Florence S. Wald dies at 91; former dean of Yale's nursing program pioneered U.S. hospice care.

Michael Crichton
November 4, 2008
Michael Crichton, the million-selling author who made scientific research terrifying and irresistible in such thrillers as Jurassic Park, Timeline and The Andromeda Strain, has died. Crichton died Tuesday in Los Angeles at age 66 after privately battling cancer.

Madelyn Dunham
November 3, 2008
Senator Barack Obama’s grandmother, a central figure in his life who helped raise him during his teen-age years, died in Hawaii on Monday morning.

Levi Stubbs
October 17, 2008
Four Tops lead singer Levi Stubbs, who possessed one of the most dynamic and emotive voices of all the Motown singers, died Friday at 72.

Paul Newman
September 26, 2008
Paul Newman, 83, the actor and sex symbol who surged to stardom by playing loners as well as criminal and moral outlaws—anything to downplay his astonishing looks—died of cancer yesterday at his farmhouse in Westport, Conn.

Nancy Hicks Maynard
September 21, 2008
Nancy Hicks Maynard, who was the first black woman to be a reporter at the New York Times and with her husband bought and published the Oakland Tribune, still the only major metropolitan daily to have been owned by African-Americans, died Sunday in Los Angeles. She was 61 and lived in Santa Monica, Calif.

Stephanie Tubbs Jones
August 20, 2008
Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, a key figure in Ohio Democratic politics and the chairman of the House ethics committee, died yesterday at a Cleveland hospital after suffering a brain hemorrhage.

Isaac Hayes
August 10, 2008
Isaac Hayes, the musician, composer and producer whose innovative sound changed the shape of pop music and whose shaved head, bejeweled outfits and regal demeanor embodied African American masculinity in the 1970s, has died. He was 65.

Bernie Mac
August 9, 2008
Bernie Mac blended style, authority and a touch of self-aware bluster to make audiences laugh as well as connect with him. For Mac, who died Saturday at age 50, it was a winning mix, delivering him from a poor childhood to stardom as a standup comedian, in films including the casino heist caper Ocean's Eleven and his acclaimed sitcom, The Bernie Mac Show.

Estelle Getty
July 22, 2008
Estelle Getty, the diminutive actress who spent 40 years struggling for success before landing a role of a lifetime in 1985 as the sarcastic octogenarian Sophia on TV's The Golden Girls, died yesterday. She was 84.

George Carlin
June 22, 2008
George Carlin, 71, the much-honored American stand-up comedian whose long career was distinguished by pointed social commentary that placed him on the cultural cutting edge, died last night in Santa Monica, Calif.

Tim Russert
June 13, 2008
Russert died suddenly last week—in the prime of his career as a television journalist and in the midst of one of the great political campaigns he so thoroughly enjoyed.

Bo Diddley
June 2, 2008
Bo Diddley was a singer and guitarist who invented his own name, his own guitars, his own beat and, with a handful of other musical pioneers, rock ’n’ roll itself.

Sydney Pollack
May 26, 2008
Sydney Pollack, 73, a director and producer of popular Hollywood movies for nearly four decades, including the comedy Tootsie, and who won Academy Awards for Out of Africa, died May 26 at his home in Los Angeles. He had cancer.

Robert Rauschenberg
May 12, 2008
Robert Rauschenberg, whose feverish inventiveness made him one of the most widely influential artists of the past half-century and whose work erased the borders separating painting, sculpture and printmaking, died Monday at his home in Captiva, Fla. He was 82.

Murray Jarvik
May 8, 2008
Murray Jarvik, a psychopharmacologist who was among the first to study the hallucinogenic drug LSD and whose later research on the physiology and psychology of smoking was instrumental in the development of the nicotine patch, died Thursday at his home. He was 84.

Albert Hofmann
April 29, 2008
Hofmann, the father of the mind-altering drug LSD whose medical discovery grew into a notorious "problem child," died in Switzerland. He was 102.

Charlton Heston
April 5, 2008
Charlton Heston, 83, an Academy Award-winning actor who starred in epics such as Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments and then became a conservative political activist and influential president of the National Rifle Association, died last night at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif.