Notable Deaths on July 24

Rodney James Alcala, also known as John Berger and John Burger, was an American serial killer and convicted sex offender who was sentenced to death in California for five murders committed between 1977 and 1979. He pleaded guilty and received two sentences, both twenty-five years to life, for two further murders committed in New York State. He was also indicted for one murder in Wyoming, although the charges filed there were dropped. While Alcala has been conclusively linked to nine murders, the true number of victims remains unknown and could be as high as 130.

Peter Sellers was an English actor and comedian. He first came to prominence with his performances on the BBC Radio comedy series The Goon Show. Sellers was featured on a number of hit comic songs and became internationally acclaimed for his film roles, most notably as Chief Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther series.

Martin Van Buren was the eighth president of the United States, serving from 1837 to 1841. He co-founded the Democratic Party with Andrew Jackson and became Jackson's vice president from 1833 to 1837.

David Hattersley Warner was an English actor who portrayed a variety of villainous characters, as well as more sympathetic roles, in a career spanning six decades across stage and screen. His accolades include a Primetime Emmy Award and nominations for a BAFTA Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award.

Sherman Alexander Hemsley was an American actor and comedian. He was known for his roles as George Jefferson on the CBS television series All in the Family and The Jeffersons (1975–1985), Deacon Ernest Frye on the NBC series Amen (1986–1991), and B. P. Richfield on the ABC series Dinosaurs. For his work on The Jeffersons, Hemsley was nominated for a Golden Globe Award and an Emmy Award. Hemsley also won an NAACP Image Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Comedy Series or Special in 1982.

Raymon Lee Cramton, known professionally as Chad Everett, was an American actor who appeared in more than 40 films and television series. He played Dr. Joe Gannon in the television drama Medical Center, which aired from 1969 to 1976.

Margaret Nixon McEathron, known professionally as Marni Nixon, was an American soprano and ghost singer for featured actresses in musical films. She was the singing voice of leading actresses on the soundtracks of several musicals, including Deborah Kerr in The King and I and An Affair to Remember, Natalie Wood in West Side Story, and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, although her roles were concealed from audiences when the films were released. Several of the songs she dubbed appeared on AFI's 100 Years...100 Songs list.

Constance Campbell Bennett was an American stage, film, radio, and television actress and producer. She was a major Hollywood star during the 1920s and 1930s; during the early 1930s, she was the highest-paid actress in Hollywood. Bennett frequently played society women, focusing on melodramas in the early 1930s and then taking more comedic roles in the late 1930s and 1940s. She is best remembered for her leading roles in What Price Hollywood? (1932), Bed of Roses (1933), Topper (1937), Topper Takes a Trip (1938), and had a prominent supporting role in Greta Garbo's last film, Two-Faced Woman (1941).

Trevor John Francis was an English footballer who played as a forward for a number of clubs in England, the United States, Italy, Scotland and Australia. In 1979 he became Britain's first £1 million player following his transfer from Birmingham City to Nottingham Forest. He scored the winning goal for Forest in the 1979 European Cup final against Malmö. He won the European Cup again with the club the following year. At international level, he played for England 52 times between 1976 and 1986, scoring 12 goals, and played at the 1982 FIFA World Cup.

Daniel Milton Peek was an American musician, singer, and songwriter, best known as the co-founder of the band America, and later a "pioneer" in contemporary Christian music.

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa , art name Chōkōdō Shujin (澄江堂主人), was a Japanese writer active in the Taishō period in Japan. He is regarded as the "father of the Japanese short story", and Japan's premier literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, is named after him. He took his own life at the age of 35 through an overdose of barbital.

Orleans is an American pop rock band formed in 1972 in Woodstock, New York, by John Hall, Larry Hoppen, and Wells Kelly. Larry's younger brother, bassist Lance Hoppen, and drummer Jerry Marotta joined the band in 1972 and 1976, respectively. The band is best known for its hits "Dance with Me" ; "Still the One", from the album Waking and Dreaming; and "Love Takes Time". The group's name evolved from the music it was playing when it formed; their music is inspired in part by Louisiana artists, including Allen Toussaint and the Neville Brothers.

Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Polish-born Jewish American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, essayist, and translator in the United States. Some of his works were adapted for the theater. He wrote and published first in Yiddish and later translated his own works into English with the help of editors and collaborators. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. A leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, he was awarded two U.S. National Book Awards, one in Children's Literature for his memoir A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw (1970) and one in Fiction for his collection A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories (1974).

Alexander Gordon Higgins was a Northern Irish professional snooker player and a two-time world snooker champion. Nicknamed "the Hurricane" for his rapid play, and sometimes known as the "People's Champion" for his popularity and charisma, he is remembered as one of the sport's most iconic figures and is often credited as being a key figure in snooker's success as a mainstream televised sport in the 1980s.

Sir James Chadwick was a British experimental physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1935 for his discovery of the neutron. In 1941, he wrote the final draft of the MAUD Report, which inspired the U.S. government to begin serious atomic bomb research efforts. He was the head of the British team that worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He was knighted in Britain in 1945 for his achievements in nuclear physics.

Don Carlos, Prince of Asturias, was the eldest son and heir apparent of King Philip II of Spain. His mother was Maria Manuela of Portugal, daughter of John III of Portugal. Carlos was known to be mentally unstable and was imprisoned by his father in early 1568, dying after half a year of solitary confinement. His imprisonment and death were utilized in Spain's Black Legend. His life inspired the play Don Carlos by Friedrich Schiller and the opera Don Carlos by Giuseppe Verdi.

Matilda of Tuscany, or Matilda of Canossa, also referred to as la Gran Contessa, was a member of the House of Canossa in the second half of the eleventh century. Matilda was one of the most important governing figures of medieval Italy. She reigned in a time of constant battles, political intrigues, and excommunications by the Church.

William Joseph Brennan Jr. was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1956 to 1990. He was the eighth-longest serving justice in Supreme Court history, and was known for being a leader of the Court's liberal wing.

Albert Ellis was an American psychologist and psychotherapist who founded rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT). He held MA and PhD degrees in clinical psychology from Columbia University, and was certified by the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP). He also founded, and was the President of, the New York City-based Albert Ellis Institute. He is generally considered to be one of the originators of the cognitive revolutionary paradigm shift in psychotherapy and an early proponent and developer of cognitive-behavioral therapies.

Dame Cleo Laine, Lady Dankworth was a British singer and actress known for her scat singing. She was the wife of jazz composer and musician Sir John Dankworth and the mother of bassist Alec and singer Jacqui Dankworth. Laine had popular success with singles such as "You'll Answer To Me" and appeared in a range of musical theatre productions. She received a number of awards and honours including appointment as an OBE in 1979, and a Grammy in 1986; she became a dame in 1997.

George William Adam Rodger was a British photojournalist. He was noted for his work in Africa, and for photographing mass deaths at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during the end of the World War II.

Witold Marian Gombrowicz was a Polish writer and playwright. His works are characterised by deep psychological analysis, a certain sense of paradox and absurd, anti-nationalist flavor. In 1937, he published his first novel, Ferdydurke, which presented many of his usual themes: problems of immaturity and youth, creation of identity in interactions with others, and an ironic, critical examination of class roles in Polish society and culture.

George Maxwell Alagiah was a British newsreader, journalist and television presenter for the BBC. From 2007 until 2022, he was the presenter of the BBC News at Six and the main presenter of GMT on BBC World News from its launch in 2010 until 2014. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2008 New Year Honours.

John Evans Fiifi Atta Mills was a Ghanaian politician and legal scholar who served as the 11th president of Ghana from 2009 until his death in 2012. He was inaugurated on 7 January 2009, having defeated the governing party candidate Nana Akufo-Addo in the 2008 Ghanaian presidential election. He was previously the third vice president from 1997 to 2001 under President Jerry Rawlings, and he contested unsuccessfully in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections as the candidate of the National Democratic Congress (NDC). He was the first, and to date, the only Ghanaian head of state to die in office.

Léonie Marie Julie Bathiat, known professionally as Arletty, was a French actress, singer, and fashion model. As an actress she is particularly known for classics directed by Marcel Carné, including Hotel du Nord (1938), Le jour se lève (1939) and Children of Paradise (1945). She was found guilty of treason for an affair with a German officer during World War II.

Alexandre-Pierre Georges "Sacha" Guitry was a French stage actor, film actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright of the boulevard theatre. He was the son of a leading French actor, Lucien Guitry, and followed his father into the theatrical profession. He became known for his stage performances, particularly in boulevardier roles. He was also a prolific playwright, writing 115 plays throughout his career. He was married five times, always to rising actresses whose careers he furthered. Probably his best-known wife was Yvonne Printemps to whom he was married between 1919 and 1932.

Ingrid Barbara Sischy was a South African-born American writer and editor who specialized in covering art, photography, and fashion. She rose to prominence as the editor of Artforum from 1979 to 1988, and was editor-in-chief of Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine from 1989 to 2008. Until her death in 2015, she and her partner Sandra Brant edited the Italian, Spanish and German editions of Vanity Fair.

Dale Snodgrass was a United States Navy aviator and air show performer who according to the Spokane Spokesman-Review was considered one of the greatest fighter pilots of all time.

Hermann Raster was an American editor, abolitionist, writer, and anti-temperance political boss who served as chief editor and part-owner of the Illinois Staats-Zeitung, a widely circulated newspaper in the German language in the United States, between 1867 and 1891. Together with publisher A.C. Hesing, Raster exerted considerable control over the German vote in the Midwest and forced the Republican Party to formally adopt an anti-prohibition platform in 1872, known as the Raster Resolution. He was appointed as Collector of Internal Revenue for the First District of Illinois by President Ulysses S. Grant but resigned from this post shortly thereafter. Raster returned to Europe in 1890 when his health began to fail him and died filling a minor diplomatic role in Berlin. Today he is best remembered for his extensive correspondence with Western intellectual and political figures of the time, such as Joseph Pulitzer, Elihu Washburne, and Francis Wayland Parker, much of which is preserved at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

Ahmad Shamlou, also known under his pen name A. Bamdad was an Iranian poet, writer, and journalist. Shamlou was arguably the most influential poet of modern Iran. His initial poetry was influenced by and in the tradition of Nima Yooshij. In fact, Abdolali Dastgheib, Iranian literary critic, argues that Shamlou is one of the pioneers of modern Persian poetry and has had the greatest influence, after Nima, on Iranian poets of his era. Shamlou's poetry is complex, yet his imagery, which contributes significantly to the intensity of his poems, is accessible. As the base, he uses the traditional imagery familiar to his Iranian audience through the works of Persian masters like Hafez and Omar Khayyam. For infrastructure and impact, he uses a kind of everyday imagery in which personified oxymoronic elements are spiked with an unreal combination of the abstract and the concrete thus far unprecedented in Persian poetry, which distressed some of the admirers of more traditional poetry.

Pius Nkonzo Langa SCOB was Chief Justice of South Africa from June 2005 to October 2009. Formerly a human rights lawyer, he was appointed as a puisne judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa upon its inception in 1995. He was the Deputy Chief Justice of South Africa from November 2001 until May 2005, when President Thabo Mbeki elevated him to the Chief Justiceship. He was South Africa's first black African Chief Justice.

Ivan Ančić was a Croatian Franciscan priest and religious writer in the Catholic Revival tradition. Ančić, a native of Lipa in the region of Duvno, joined the Franciscan order in Bosnia and received an education in the Franciscan friaries in Ottoman Bosnia and Herzegovina and Italy. He served as a parish priest in his home province of Duvno and held various religious offices in several locations in Bosnia and Herzegovina. After arriving in Ancona, Italy, in 1674, he began publishing his religious works written in Shtokavian dialect of Illyrian, an older term for the language spoken in regions historically associated with Croatia. Ančić is the first Bosnian Franciscan to write in a commoners' language using the Latin alphabet.

Matooskie, also known as Anne "Nancy" McKenzie, was a First Nations woman of the Chipewyan (Dënesųłı̨né) nation in Canada. The daughter of Scottish-Canadian fur trader Roderick Mackenzie, Matooskie was abandoned by her father as a young girl, and was left in the care of North West Company trader John Stuart. She was later abandoned by her first husband, John George McTavish. Supported by the Hudson's Bay Company, Matooskie and her family moved to various Hudson's Bay outposts across Western Canada, before settling at Fort Vancouver in the Columbia District following the death of her second husband. In the later years before her death in 1851, she accompanied her daughter and son-in-law.

Anthony David Lema was an American professional golfer who rose to fame in the mid-1960s and won a major title, the 1964 Open Championship at the Old Course at St Andrews in Scotland. He died two years later at age 32 in an aircraft accident near Chicago.

Saw Maung was a Burmese military leader and statesman who served as Chairman of the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) and Prime Minister of Burma from 1988 until 1992, when he was deposed by rival generals who disapproved Saw Maung decisions that were in favor of Aung San Suu Kyi. Besides this, he was the 8th Commander-in-Chief of the Tatmadaw. He was the first Burmese general to get the rank of Senior General, which was created for him in 1990.

Sol Gareth "Garry" Davis was an international peace activist best known for renouncing his American citizenship and interrupting the United Nations in 1948 to advocate for world government as a way to end nationalistic wars.

Hamzah Haz was an Indonesian politician who served as the ninth vice president of Indonesia from 2001 to 2004 under President Megawati Sukarnoputri. Prior to serving as vice president, Hamzah served as a cabinet minister and a member of the People's Representative Council (DPR). He also chaired the United Development Party (PPP) from 1998 to 2007, and was the party's presidential candidate in the 2004 Indonesian presidential election.

Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Ṭughj ibn Juff ibn Yiltakīn ibn Fūrān ibn Fūrī ibn Khāqān, better known by the title al-Ikhshīd after 939, was an Abbasid commander and governor who became the autonomous ruler of Egypt and parts of Syria (Levant) from 935 until his death in 946. He was the founder of the Ikhshidid dynasty, which ruled the region until the Fatimid conquest of 969.

Ezechiele "Lele" Ramin, MCCJ was an Italian Comboni missionary and artist. He was described as a martyr of charity by Pope John Paul II after his murder in Brazil while defending the rights of the farmers and the Suruí natives of the Rondônia area against local landowners. His cause for beatification was opened in 2016, granting him the title of a Servant of God.

Sir William Richard Shaboe Doll was a British physician who became an epidemiologist in the mid-20th century and made important contributions to that discipline. He was a pioneer in research linking smoking to health problems. With Ernst Wynder, Bradford Hill and Evarts Graham, he was credited with being the first to prove that smoking increased the risk of lung cancer and heart disease.

Robert Steven Ledley, professor of physiology and biophysics and professor of radiology at Georgetown University School of Medicine, pioneered the use of electronic digital computers in biology and medicine. In 1959, he wrote two influential articles in Science: "Reasoning Foundations of Medical Diagnosis" and "Digital Electronic Computers in Biomedical Science". Both articles encouraged biomedical researchers and physicians to adopt computer technology.

Alonzo "Skip" Thomas III, nicknamed "Dr. Death", was an American professional football player. A cornerback, Thomas played college football at Arizona Western Junior College before transferring to the University of Southern California. After college, he spent six seasons with the Oakland Raiders of the National Football League (NFL) before retiring from football.

Joris Hoefnagel or Georg Hoefnagel was a Flemish painter, printmaker, miniaturist, draftsman and merchant. He is noted for his illustrations of natural history subjects, topographical views, illuminations and mythological works. He was one of the last manuscript illuminators and made a major contribution to the development of topographical drawing.

Shafin Ahmed was a Bangladeshi rock bassist, singer-songwriter, record producer and politician. He was the lead singer, songwriter and bassist for the Bangladeshi rock band Miles, where he and his elder brother Hamin Ahmed joined in 1979 and led the band.

David Servan-Schreiber was a French physician, neuroscientist and author. He was a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He was also a lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine of Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1.

Dmytro Semenovich Kiva was a Ukrainian engineer and academic who was a recipient of the Hero of Ukraine, Order of Merit and Order of Prince Yaroslav the Wise. Additionally, he was once the President–General designer at Antonov.

Fritz Albert Lipmann was a German-American biochemist and a co-discoverer in 1945 of coenzyme A. For this, together with other research on coenzyme A, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1953.

Gregorio Peces-Barba Martínez was a Spanish politician and jurist. He was one of the seven jurists who wrote the Spanish Constitution of 1978, acting as a representative of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party.

Helen Cordero was a Cochiti Pueblo potter from Cochiti, New Mexico. She was renowned for her storyteller pottery figurines, a motif she invented, based upon the traditional "singing mother" motif.

Jacob van Artevelde, sometimes written in English as James van Artevelde, also known as The Wise Man and the Brewer of Ghent, was a Flemish statesman and political leader.

Norman Dello Joio was an American composer active for over half a century. Best known for his choral music, he won a Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1957.

Cuthbert Wilfrid Francis Noyce was an English mountaineer and author. He was a member of the 1953 British Expedition that made the first ascent of Mount Everest.

Sir John Salusbury was a Welsh knight, politician and poet of the Elizabethan era. He is notable for his opposition to the faction of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, and for his patronage of complex acrostic and allegorical poetry that anticipated the Metaphysical movement.

Emperor Shirakawa was the 72nd emperor of Japan, according to the traditional order of succession.

Berthold of Hanover was a German Cistercian and Bishop of Livonia, who met his death in a crusade against the pagan Livonians.

John Boste is a saint in the Catholic Church, and one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.

Benedetto Giacomo Marcello was an Italian composer, writer, advocate, magistrate, and teacher.

Nathaniel Lardner was an English Presbyterian minister and theologian.

Vicente Acosta was a Salvadoran poet.

Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi was a Russian landscape painter of Urum origin.

Nicola Zaccaria, born Nicholas Angelos Zachariou was a Greek bass.

Frederick Irwin "Fred" Dretske was an American philosopher noted for his contributions to epistemology and the philosophy of mind.

Dale Wayne Schlueter was an American professional basketball player born in Tacoma, Washington.

Margaret Frances "Peg" Lynch was an American writer, actress, and sitcom creator. The BBC dubbed her, “the woman who invented sitcom”.