Notable Deaths on August 30

August 30 has 102 recorded notable deaths across history, from 526 to 2024. This focused page highlights 20 people with the strongest available profile context.

Charles Bronson

2003 — Charles Bronson

American actor and soldier (born 1921)

By · Wikipedia

Notable Deaths 102 source records 526 – 2024

Major events on August 30

See what else happened on this day in history.

  1. 1800 Gabriel Prosser postpones a planned slave rebellion in Richmond, Virginia, but is arrested before he can make it happen. Source
  2. 1983 STS-8: The Space Shuttle Challenger takes off on the first night launch of the shuttle program. Guion Bluford becomes the first African-American in space on this mission. Source

Did you know about Charles Bronson

Near the end of the decade, he had his first cinematic leading role in Machine-Gun Kelly (1958).

Did you know about Valerie Harper

Valerie Harper played Rhoda Morgenstern on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–1977) and its spin-off Rhoda (1974–1978).

Did you know about Theodoric the Great

Though Theodoric himself only used the title 'king' (rex), some scholars characterize him as a Western Roman emperor in all but name, since he ruled a large part of the former Western Roman Empire.

Did you know about Louis XI

Louis XI, called the Prudent, was King of France from 1461 to 1483.

Did you know about Seamus Heaney

Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume.


More major people who died on August 30

Notable people are ranked by substantive profile depth and public notability.

2019 Valerie Harper

Valerie Harper

American actress and writer (born 1939)
Valerie Kathryn Harper was an American actress. She began her career as a dancer on Broadway, making her debut as a replacement in the musical Li'l Abner. She played Rhoda Morgenstern on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–1977) and its spin-off Rhoda (1974–1978). For her work on Mary Tyler Moore, she received the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series three times, and later received the award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for Rhoda.
526 Theodoric the Great

Theodoric the Great

Italian ruler (born 454)
Theodoric the Great, also called the Amal, was king of the Ostrogoths (471–526), and ruler of the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy between 493 and 526, regent of the Visigoths (511–526), and a patrician of the Eastern Roman Empire. As ruler of the combined Gothic realms, Theodoric controlled an empire stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Adriatic Sea. Though Theodoric himself only used the title 'king' (rex), some scholars characterize him as a Western Roman emperor in all but name, since he ruled a large part of the former Western Roman Empire. He also received and used the former Western imperial regalia from Constantinople in 497, and exercised imperial powers recognized in the East, such as naming consuls. The Italian aristocracy referred to him using the imperial title princeps.
1483 Louis XI

Louis XI

King of France (born 1423)
Louis XI, called the Prudent, was King of France from 1461 to 1483. He succeeded his father, Charles VII. Louis entered into open rebellion against his father in a short-lived revolt known as the Praguerie in 1440. The king forgave his rebellious vassals, including Louis, to whom he entrusted the management of the Dauphiné, then a province in southeastern France. Louis's ceaseless intrigues, however, led his father to banish him from court. From the Dauphiné, Louis led his own political establishment and married Charlotte of Savoy, daughter of Louis, Duke of Savoy, against the will of his father. Charles VII sent an army to compel his son to his will, but Louis fled to Burgundy, where he was hosted by Philip the Good, the Duke of Burgundy, Charles's greatest enemy.
2013 Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney

Irish poet and playwright, Nobel Prize laureate (born 1939)
Seamus Justin Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age". Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller." Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world".
1970 Abraham Zapruder

Abraham Zapruder

American clothing manufacturer, witness to the assassination of John F. Kennedy (born 1905)
Abraham Zapruder was a Russian-born American clothing manufacturer based in Dallas, Texas, who filmed the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. Of Russian-Jewish descent, Zapruder resided in Dallas and founded a fashion company. On the day of the assassination, he captured the shooting in a home movie while filming Kennedy's presidential limousine as it traveled through Dealey Plaza. The Zapruder film is regarded as the most complete footage of the assassination. Zapruder died in 1970.
1946 Konstantin Rodzaevsky

Konstantin Rodzaevsky

Russian lawyer (born 1907)
Konstantin Vladimirovich Rodzaevsky was the leader of the Russian Fascist Party, which he led in exile from Manchuria. Rodzaevsky was also the chief editor of the RFP paper Nash Put'. After the defeat of anti-communist forces in the Russian Civil War, he fled to Manchuria in 1925 and eventually became the leading figure of the Russian Fascist movement. He was lured by the NKVD to return to the Soviet Union with false promises of immunity and executed in a Lubyanka prison cellar after a trial for "anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary activities".
2003 Donald Davidson

Donald Davidson

American philosopher and academic (born 1917)
Donald Herbert Davidson was an American philosopher and the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley (1981–2003), having previously held teaching appointments at Stanford University, Rockefeller University, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago. Davidson was known for his charismatic personality and difficult writing style, as well as the systematic nature of his philosophy. His work exerted considerable influence in many areas of philosophy from the 1960s onward, particularly in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and action theory. Most of Davidson's influence was on analytic philosophy, his tradition, but his work has attracted attention in continental philosophy.
1935 Henri Barbusse

Henri Barbusse

French journalist and author (born 1873)
Henri Barbusse was a French novelist, short story writer, journalist, poet and political activist. He began his literary career in the 1890s as a Symbolist poet and continued as a neo-Naturalist novelist; in 1916, he published Under Fire, a novel about World War I based on his experience which is described as one of the earliest works of the Lost Generation movement or as the work which started it; the novel had a major impact on the later writers of the movement, namely on Ernest Hemingway and Erich Maria Remarque. Barbusse is considered one of the important French writers of 1910–1939 who mingled the war memories with moral and political meditations.
1621 Bahāʾ al-dīn al-ʿĀmilī

Bahāʾ al-dīn al-ʿĀmilī

co-founder of Isfahan School of Islamic Philosophy (born 1547)
Baha al-Din al-Amili, commonly known as Sheikh Bahāʾī, was a Twelver Shia Muslim scholar and polymath in Safavid Iran, who composed various works in Arabic and Persian. Closely tied to the court of Shah Abbas the Great, he became known for his role in the intellectual sphere of Isfahan and is seen as a leading figure in his field, with seventy-seven scholars counted among his students. An ethnic Arab, he was originally from Jabal Amil in Ottoman Syria. During his childhood, his family moved to Iran, where his father Husayn ibn Abd al-Samad became the shaykh al-Islam in Herat under Tahmasp I.
1131 Hervey le Breton

Hervey le Breton

bishop of Bangor and Ely
Hervey le Breton was a Breton cleric who became Bishop of Bangor in Wales and later Bishop of Ely in England. Appointed to Bangor by King William II of England, when the Normans were advancing into Wales, Hervey was unable to remain in his diocese when the Welsh began to drive the Normans back from their recent conquests. Hervey's behaviour towards the Welsh seems to have contributed to his expulsion from his see. Although the new king, Henry I wished to translate Hervey to the see of Lisieux in Normandy, it was unsuccessful.
2014 Igor Decraene

Igor Decraene

Belgian cyclist (born 1996)
Igor Decraene was a Belgian cyclist. In 2013, he became the UCI world junior men's time trial champion. The event took place on 24 September in Florence, Tuscany, Italy. In 2013 and 2014 he was also the Belgian national champion in the time trial for juniors men. He also won the Crystal Bicycle for Best Young Rider in 2013. At the time of his death, he was preparing to defend his junior world time trial title at the 2014 UCI Road World Championships in Ponferrada, Spain on 23 September.
1995 Fischer Black

Fischer Black

American economist and academic (born 1938)
Fischer Sheffey Black, Jr. was an American economist, best known as one of the co-authors of the Black–Scholes option pricing model. He held academic positions at the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, later working at Goldman Sachs. In addition to his work on option pricing, Black made important contributions to the development of the capital asset pricing model (CAPM). He also proposed ideas in monetary economics and in theories of the business cycle.
2015 Marvin Mandel

Marvin Mandel

American lawyer and politician, 56th Governor of Maryland (born 1920)
Marvin Mandel was an American politician and lawyer who served as the 56th governor of Maryland from January 7, 1969, to January 17, 1979, including a one-and-a-half-year period when Lieutenant Governor Blair Lee III served as the state's acting governor from June 1977 to January 15, 1979 while Mandel was in federal prison for mail fraud and racketeering. He was a member of the Democratic Party, as well as Maryland's first, and to date, only Jewish governor.
1940 J. J. Thomson

J. J. Thomson

English physicist and mathematician, Nobel Prize laureate (born 1856)
Sir Joseph John Thomson was a British physicist. He received the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physics "in recognition of the great merits of his theoretical and experimental investigations on the conduction of electricity by gases." In 1897, he showed that cathode rays were composed of previously unknown negatively charged particles, which he calculated must have bodies much smaller than atoms and a very large charge-to-mass ratio. The electron was the first subatomic particle to be discovered.
1963 Guy Burgess

Guy Burgess

English-Soviet spy (born 1911)
Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess was a British diplomat and Soviet double agent, and a member of the Cambridge Five spy ring that operated from the mid-1930s to the early years of the Cold War era. His defection in 1951 to the Soviet Union, with his fellow spy Donald Maclean, led to a serious breach in Anglo-United States intelligence co-operation, and caused long-lasting disruption and demoralisation in Britain's foreign and diplomatic services.
2006 Robin Cooke

Robin Cooke

Baron Cooke of Thorndon, New Zealand lawyer and judge (born 1926)
Robin Brunskill Cooke, Baron Cooke of Thorndon, was a New Zealand judge and later a British Law Lord and member of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. He is widely considered one of New Zealand's most influential jurists, and is the only New Zealand judge to have sat in the House of Lords. He was a Non-Permanent Judge of the Court of Final Appeal of Hong Kong from 1997 to 2006.
1961 Charles Coburn

Charles Coburn

American actor (born 1877)
Charles Douville Coburn was an American actor and theatrical producer. He was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award three times – for The Devil and Miss Jones (1941), The More the Merrier (1943) and The Green Years (1946) – winning for his performance in The More the Merrier. He was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 for his contribution to the film industry.
1949 Arthur Fielder

Arthur Fielder

English cricketer (born 1877)
Arthur Fielder was an English cricketer who played as a fast bowler for Kent County Cricket Club and the England cricket team from 1900 to 1914. He played a major role in Kent's four County Championship wins in the years before World War I and toured Australia twice with the England team, making six Test match appearances. He was chosen as one of Wisden's Cricketers of the Year in 1907.
1329 Khutughtu Khan Kusala

Khutughtu Khan Kusala

Chinese emperor (born 1300)
Khutughtu Khan, also known by his temple name as the Emperor Mingzong of Yuan, was a son of Khayishan who seized the throne of the Yuan dynasty of China in 1329, but died in suspicious circumstances six months later. Apart from the Emperor of China, he is considered as the 13th Great Khan of the Mongol Empire, although it was only nominal due to the division of the empire.

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