Did you know about Larry King
Larry King was a WMBM radio interviewer in the Miami area in the 1950s and 1960s.
Notable Deaths on January 23
January 23 has 94 recorded notable deaths across history, from 667 to 2024. This focused page highlights 20 people with the strongest available profile context.
2021 — Larry King
American journalist and talk show host (born 1933)
By thisDay.info Editorial Team · — Wikipedia
Notable Deaths
94 source records
667 – 2024
Today in history
Major events on January 23
See what else happened on this day in history.
Did you know about Hal Holbrook
Hal Holbrook first received critical acclaim in 1954 for a one-man stage show, titled Mark Twain Tonight!, that he developed while studying at Denison University.
Did you know about Ferdinand II of Aragon (born 1452)
Ferdinand II, also known as Ferdinand the Catholic, was King of Aragon from 1479 until his death in 1516.
Did you know about William Pitt the Younger
William Pitt was a British statesman who served as the last prime minister of Great Britain from 1783 until the Acts of Union 1800, and the first official prime minister of the United Kingdom from January 1801.
Did you know about Samuel Barber
Samuel Osmond Barber II was an American composer, pianist, conductor, baritone, and music educator, and one of the most celebrated composers of the mid-20th century.
More major people who died on January 23
Notable people are ranked by substantive profile depth and public notability.
2021
Hal Holbrook
American actor and director (born 1925)
Harold Rowe Holbrook Jr. was an American actor. He first received critical acclaim in 1954 for a one-man stage show, titled Mark Twain Tonight!, that he developed while studying at Denison University. He won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play in 1966 for his portrayal of Twain. He continued to perform his signature role for more than 60 years, retiring the show in 2017 due to his failing health. Throughout his career, he also won five Primetime Emmy Awards for his work on television and was nominated for an Academy Award for his work in film.
1516
Ferdinand II of Aragon (born 1452)
Ferdinand II, also known as Ferdinand the Catholic, was King of Aragon from 1479 until his death in 1516. As the husband and co-ruler of Queen Isabella I of Castile, he was also King of Castile from 1475 to 1504. He reigned jointly with Isabella over a dynastically unified Spain; together, they are known as the Catholic Monarchs. Ferdinand is considered the de facto first king of Spain, and was described as such during his reign, even though, legally, Castile and Aragon remained two separate kingdoms until they were formally united by the Nueva Planta decrees issued between 1707 and 1716.
1806
William Pitt the Younger
English politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (born 1759)
William Pitt was a British statesman who served as the last prime minister of Great Britain from 1783 until the Acts of Union 1800, and the first official prime minister of the United Kingdom from January 1801. He left office in March 1801, but served as prime minister again from 1804 until his death in 1806. He was also Chancellor of the Exchequer for all his time as prime minister. He is known as "Pitt the Younger" to distinguish him from his father, William Pitt the Elder, who had also previously served as prime minister from 1766–1768.
1981
Samuel Barber
American pianist and composer (born 1910)
Samuel Osmond Barber II was an American composer, pianist, conductor, baritone, and music educator, and one of the most celebrated composers of the mid-20th century. Principally influenced by nine years' composition studies with Rosario Scalero at the Curtis Institute and more than 25 years' study with his uncle, the composer Sidney Homer, Barber's music usually eschewed the experimental trends of musical modernism in favor of traditional 19th-century harmonic language and formal structure embracing lyricism and emotional expression. However, he adopted elements of modernism after 1940 in some of his compositions, such as an increased use of dissonance and chromaticism in the Cello Concerto (1945) and Medea's Dance of Vengeance (1955); and the use of tonal ambiguity and a narrow use of serialism in his Piano Sonata (1949), Prayers of Kierkegaard (1954), and Nocturne (1959).
2002
Robert Nozick
American philosopher, author, and academic (born 1938)
Robert Nozick was an American philosopher. He held the Joseph Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University, and was president of the American Philosophical Association. He is best known for his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a libertarian answer to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971), in which Nozick proposes his minimal state as the only justifiable form of government. His later work Philosophical Explanations (1981) advanced notable epistemological claims, namely his counterfactual theory of knowledge. It won Phi Beta Kappa society's Ralph Waldo Emerson Award the following year.
1992
Freddie Bartholomew
American actor (born 1924)
Frederick Cecil Bartholomew, known for his acting work as Freddie Bartholomew, was an English-American child actor who was very popular in 1930s Hollywood films. His most famous starring roles are in Captains Courageous (1937) and Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936). His child acting contemporary Mickey Rooney said of him, "He was one of the finest, if not the finest child stars that we had on the scene at that time." His Captains Courageous co-star Spencer Tracy said of him "Freddie Bartholomew's acting is so fine and so simple and so true that it's way over people's heads."
1986
Joseph Beuys
German sculptor and painter (born 1921)
Joseph Heinrich Beuys was a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and art theorist whose work reflected concepts of humanism and sociology. With Heinrich Böll, Johannes Stüttgen, Caroline Tisdall, Robert McDowell, and Enrico Wolleb, Beuys created the Free International University for Creativity & Interdisciplinary Research (FIU). Through his talks and performances, he also formed The Party for Animals and The Organisation for Direct Democracy. He was a member of a Dadaist art movement Fluxus and singularly inspirational in developing of Performance Art, called Kunst Aktionen, alongside Wiener Aktionismus that Allan Kaprow and Carolee Schneemann termed Art Happenings.
1947
Pierre Bonnard
French painter (born 1867)
Pierre Bonnard was a French painter, illustrator and printmaker, known especially for the stylized decorative qualities of his paintings and his bold use of color. A founding member of the Post-Impressionist group of avant-garde painters Les Nabis, his early work was strongly influenced by the work of Paul Gauguin, as well as the prints of Hokusai and other Japanese artists. Bonnard was a leading figure in the transition from Impressionism to Modernism. He painted landscapes, urban scenes, portraits and intimate domestic scenes, where the backgrounds, colors and painting style usually took precedence over the subject.
1805
Claude Chappe
French engineer (born 1763)
Claude Chappe was a French inventor who in 1792 demonstrated a practical semaphore system that eventually spanned all of France. His system consisted of a series of towers, each within line of sight of others, each supporting a wooden mast with two crossarms on pivots that could be placed in various positions. The operator in a tower moved the arms to a sequence of positions, spelling out text messages in semaphore code. The operator in the next tower read the message through a telescope, then passed it on to the next tower. This was the first practical telecommunications system of the industrial age, and was used until the 1850s when electric telegraph systems replaced it.
1812
Robert Craufurd
Scottish general and politician (born 1764)
Major-General Robert Craufurd was a British Army officer who served in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. After a military career which took him from India to the Netherlands, in 1810 in the Peninsular War he was given command of the Light Division, composed of the elite foot soldiers in the army at the time, under the Duke of Wellington. Craufurd was a strict disciplinarian and somewhat prone to violent mood swings which earned him the nickname "Black Bob". He was mortally wounded storming the lesser breach in the Siege of Ciudad Rodrigo on 19 January 1812 and died four days later.
2014
Elmira Nazirova
Azerbaijani composer (born 1928)
Elmira Mirza Rza-kyzy Nazirova was an Azerbaijani composer. Born to a Georgian Jewish family, she was a child prodigy who excelled at music and trained at the Azerbaijan State Conservatory for several years. At 14, she became one of the youngest members of the Composers Union of Azerbaijan. Nazirova performed abroad, where her talent was recognised by prominent musicians, and she pursued an education at the Moscow Conservatory. Through her education there, she met and became lifelong friends with Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, having significant impact on his work, particularly his Tenth Symphony.
1985
James Beard
American chef and cookbook author for whom the James Beard Foundation Awards are named (born 1905)
James Andrews Beard was an American chef, cookbook author, teacher and television personality. He pioneered television cooking shows, taught at The James Beard Cooking School in New York City and Seaside, Oregon, and lectured widely. He emphasized American cooking, prepared with fresh and wholesome American ingredients, to a country just becoming aware of its own culinary heritage. Beard taught and mentored generations of professional chefs and food enthusiasts. He published more than twenty books, and his memory is honored by his foundation's annual James Beard Awards.
1978
Terry Kath
American guitarist and songwriter (born 1946)
Terry Alan Kath was an American guitarist and singer who is best known as a founding member of the rock band Chicago. He played lead guitar and sang lead vocals on many of the band's early hit singles alongside Robert Lamm and Peter Cetera. He has been praised by his bandmates and other musicians for his guitar skills and his Ray Charles–influenced vocal style. Jimi Hendrix cited Kath as one of his favorite guitarists and considered him to be "the best guitarist in the universe."
1937
Orso Mario Corbino
Italian physicist and politician (born 1876)
Orso Mario Corbino was an Italian physicist and politician. He is noted for his studies of the influence of external magnetic fields on the motion of electrons in metals and he discovered the Corbino effect. He served as Minister for education in 1921–1922 and as Minister for National Economy in 1923–1924. He also served as professor of the University of Messina (1905) and of the University of Rome (1908). He was also the supervisor of the Via Panisperna boys.
1883
Gustave Doré
French engraver and illustrator (born 1832)
Paul Gustave Louis Christophe Doré was a French artist. He is best known for his prolific output of wood-engravings illustrating classic literature, especially those for the Vulgate Bible and Dante's Divine Comedy. These achieved great international success, and he became renowned for printmaking, although his role was normally as the designer only; at the height of his career some 40 block-cutters were employed to cut his drawings onto the wooden printing blocks, usually also signing the image.
1994
Nikolai Ogarkov
Russian field marshal (born 1917)
Nikolai Vasilyevich Ogarkov was a prominent Soviet military personality. He was promoted to Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1977. Between 1977 and 1984, he was Chief of the General Staff of the USSR. He became widely known in the West when he became the Soviet military's spokesman following the shootdown of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 near Moneron Island in September 1983. He was dismissed as Chief of the General Staff on 6 September 1984.
1744
Giambattista Vico
Italian historian and philosopher (born 1668)
Giambattista Vico was an Italian philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist during the Italian Enlightenment. He criticized the expansion and development of modern rationalism, finding Cartesian analysis and other types of reductionism impractical to human life, and he was an apologist for classical antiquity and the Renaissance humanities, in addition to being the first expositor of the fundamentals of social science and of semiotics. He is recognised as one of the first Counter-Enlightenment figures in history.
1973
Alexander Onassis
American-Greek businessman (born 1948)
Alexander Socrates Onassis was an American-born Greek businessman. He was the son of the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis and his first wife Tina Livanos. He and his sister Christina Onassis were upset by his father's marriage to Jacqueline Kennedy, and he was credited with attempting to improve the relationship between his father and his brother-in-law and business rival Stavros Niarchos, who in 1971 married Alexander's mother after her divorce from Aristotle Onassis.
2018
Hugh Masekela
South African trumpeter, composer and singer (born 1939)
Hugh Ramapolo Masekela was a South African trumpeter, flugelhornist, cornetist, singer and composer who was described as "the father of South African jazz". Masekela was known for his jazz compositions and for writing well-known anti-apartheid songs such as "Soweto Blues" and "Bring Him Back Home". He also had a number-one US pop hit in 1968 with the song "Grazing in the Grass", which was later covered by various other artists.