Notable Deaths on August 8

Patricia Neal was an American actress of stage and screen. She is well known for, among other roles, playing World War II widow Helen Benson in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), radio journalist Marcia Jeffries in A Face in the Crowd (1957), wealthy matron Emily Eustace Failenson in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), and the worn-out housekeeper Alma Brown in Hud (1963). She also featured as the matriarch in the television film The Homecoming: A Christmas Story (1971); her role as Olivia Walton was re-cast for the series it inspired, The Waltons. A major star of the 1950s and 1960s, she was the recipient of an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Tony Award, and two British Academy Film Awards, and was nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards.

Issa Hayatou was a Cameroonian sports executive, athlete, and football administrator best known for serving as the president of the Confederation of African Football (CAF) between 1988 and 2017. He served as the acting FIFA president until 26 February 2016 as the previous president Sepp Blatter was banned from all football-related activities in 2015 as a part of that year's FIFA corruption investigation. In 2002, he ran for president of FIFA but was defeated by Blatter. He was also a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

Barbara Bel Geddes was an American stage and screen actress, artist, and children's author whose career spanned almost five decades. She received various accolades, including a Primetime Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award, as well as nominations for an Academy Award and two Tony Awards. Bel Geddes was best known for her starring role as Miss Ellie Ewing in the television series Dallas, while her notable films included I Remember Mama (1948) and Vertigo (1958). In theatre, she is best remembered as Maggie in the original Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955.

Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt was a Swiss historian of art and culture and an influential figure in the historiography of both fields. His best known work is The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). He is known as one of the major progenitors of cultural history. Sigfried Giedion described Burckhardt's achievement in the following terms: "The great discoverer of the age of the Renaissance, he first showed how a period should be treated in its entirety, with regard not only for its painting, sculpture and architecture, but for the social institutions of its daily life as well."

Jacques Joseph Tissot, better known as James Tissot, was a French painter, illustrator, and caricaturist. He was born to a drapery merchant and a milliner and decided to pursue a career in art at a young age, coming to incorporate elements of realism, early Impressionism, and academic art into his work. He is best known for a variety of genre paintings of contemporary European high society produced during the peak of his career, which focused on the people and women's fashion of the Belle Époque and Victorian England, but he would also explore many medieval, biblical, and Japoniste subjects throughout his life. His career included work as a caricaturist for Vanity Fair under the pseudonym of Coïdé.

Lothair II was the king of Lotharingia from 855 until his death. He is known for his over ten-year-long divorce case with his wife Teutberga so that he could remarry his long-standing lover Waldrada. Lothair began a relationship with Waldrada in his adolescence. By the time of his accession in September 855, he seems to have still loved her. However, the king was forced to marry Teutberga of the Bosonids and ally with her brother Hucbert to maintain his position. Lothair put away Teutberga as Hucbert's importance waned, but after she passed a trial by ordeal he was forced to take her back. Hucbert died in revolt in 864 after being replaced in Lothair's court.

Francis Hutcheson was an Irish philosopher widely regarded as one of the key figures of the early Scottish Enlightenment. He served as Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow and was a major advocate of moral sense theory, which holds that humans possess an innate sense that guides moral judgments. Hutcheson is best known for his ethical writings, in which he defends benevolence as the primary source of moral virtue and anticipates later utilitarian theories with his formulation of "the greatest happiness for the greatest number".

Peter Joshua Sculthorpe FAHA was a distinguished Australian composer and music educator. Much of his music resulted from an interest in the music of countries neighbouring Australia, as well as from the impulse to bring together aspects of Aboriginal Australian music with that of the heritage of the West. He was known primarily for his orchestral and chamber music, such as Kakadu (1988) and Earth Cry (1986), which evoke the sounds and feeling of the Australian bushland and outback. He also wrote 18 string quartets, using unusual timbral effects, works for piano, and two operas. He stated that he wanted his music to make people feel better and happier for having listened to it. He typically avoided the dense, atonal techniques of many of his contemporary composers. His work was often characterised by its distinctive use of percussion. As one of the compositional pioneers of a distinctively Australian sound, Sculthorpe and his music have been likened to the role played by Aaron Copland in America's musical coming of age.

Alexander William Doniphan was a 19th-century American attorney, soldier and politician from Missouri who is best known today as the man who prevented the summary execution of Joseph Smith, founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, at the close of the 1838 Mormon War in that state. He also achieved renown as a leader of American troops during the Mexican–American War, as the author of a legal code that still forms the basis of New Mexico's Bill of Rights, and as a successful defense attorney in the Missouri towns of Liberty, Richmond and Independence.

William Pierce Frye was an American politician from Maine. A member of the Republican Party, Frye spent most of his political career as a legislator, serving in the Maine House of Representatives and then U.S. House of Representatives, before being elected to the U.S. Senate, where he served for 30 years before dying in office. Frye was a member of the Frye political family, and was the grandfather of Wallace H. White Jr., and the son of John March Frye. He was also a prominent member of the Peucinian Society tradition. To date, Frye is the longest serving Senator in Maine's history.

Konstantinas Sirvydas was a Lithuanian religious preacher, lexicographer, and one of the pioneers of Lithuanian literature from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, at the time a confederal part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He was a Jesuit priest, a professor at the Academia Vilnensis, and the author of, among other works, the first grammar of the Lithuanian language and the first trilingual dictionary in Lithuanian, Latin, and Polish (1619). Famous for his eloquence, Sirvydas spent 10 years of his life preaching sermons at St. Johns' Church in Vilnius.

Carl Peter Thunberg, also known as Karl Peter von Thunberg, Carl Pehr Thunberg, or Carl Per Thunberg, was a Swedish naturalist and an "apostle" of Carl Linnaeus. After studying under Linnaeus at Uppsala University, he spent seven years travelling in southern Africa and Asia, collecting and describing many plants and animals new to European science, and observing local cultures. He has been called "the father of South African botany", "pioneer of Occidental Medicine in Japan", and the "Japanese Linnaeus".

Angus MacAskill was a Scottish giant. In its 1981 edition, the Guinness Book of World Records stated he was the strongest man, the tallest non-pathological giant and the largest true giant in recorded history at 7 feet 9 inches (2.36 m), now equal largest after Olivier Rioux matched his height in 2024. He also had the largest chest measurements of any non-obese man at 80 inches (203 cm). He is the second tallest verified man from the United Kingdom.

Glen Travis Campbell was an American country musician and actor. He was best known for a series of hit songs in the 1960s and 1970s, and for hosting The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour on CBS television from 1969 until 1972. A revered session guitarist before breaking through as a solo performer, Campbell released 64 albums in a career that spanned five decades, selling over 45 million records worldwide, including twelve gold albums, four platinum albums, and one double-platinum album.

John Henry Twachtman was an American painter best known for his impressionist landscapes, though his painting style varied widely through his career. Art historians consider Twachtman's style of American Impressionism to be among the more personal and experimental of his generation. He was a member of "The Ten," a loosely-allied group of American artists dissatisfied with professional art organizations, who banded together in 1898 to exhibit their works as a stylistically unified group.

Regina Resnik was an American opera singer who had an active international career that spanned five decades. She began her career as a soprano in 1942 and soon after began a relationship with the Metropolitan Opera that spanned from 1944 until 1983. Under the advice of conductor Clemens Krauss, she began retraining her voice in the mezzo-soprano repertoire in 1953 and by 1956 had completely removed soprano literature from her performance repertoire.

Job Wilhelm Georg Erwin Erdmann von Witzleben was a German Generalfeldmarschall in the Wehrmacht and Oberbefehlshaber West, during the Second World War. A leading conspirator in the 20 July plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, he was designated to become commander in chief of the Wehrmacht in a post-Nazi regime, had the plot succeeded. After being dishonourably discharged by the Ehrenhof, he was murdered, after a show trial from the Volksgerichtshof.

Sir Nevill Francis Mott was a British theoretical physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1977 for his work on the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems, especially amorphous semiconductors. The Prize was shared with Philip W. Anderson and John Van Vleck. The three had conducted loosely related research. Mott and Anderson clarified the reasons why magnetic or amorphous materials can sometimes be metallic and sometimes insulating.

Mary Helen MacKillop RSJ was an Australian religious sister. She was born in Melbourne but is best known for her activities in South Australia. Together with Fr Julian Tenison-Woods, she founded the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, a congregation of religious sisters that established a number of schools and welfare institutions throughout Australia and New Zealand, with an emphasis on education for the rural poor.