Notable Deaths on October 5

Charles Lewis Napier was an American actor who was known for playing supporting and occasional leading roles in television and films. He was frequently cast as police officers, soldiers, or authority figures, many of them villainous or corrupt. After leaving his Kentucky hometown to serve in the Army, he graduated from college and worked as a sports coach and art teacher before settling on acting as a career. His first prominent role in a film was in Cherry, Harry & Raquel! (1969), which was the first of four films he would do with director Russ Meyer. Napier established himself in character roles and worked steadily for the next 35 years. He made numerous collaborations with director Jonathan Demme, including roles in Something Wild (1986), Married to the Mob (1988), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Philadelphia (1993), Beloved (1998), and The Manchurian Candidate (2004).

General Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess Cornwallis was a British Army officer, Whig politician and colonial administrator. In the United States and United Kingdom, he is best known as one of the leading British general officers in the American War of Independence. His surrender in 1781 to a combined Franco-American force at the siege of Yorktown ended significant hostilities in North America. Cornwallis later served as a civil and military governor in Ireland, where he helped to bring about the Act of Union; and in India, where he helped to enact the Cornwallis Code and the Permanent Settlement.

Edward James Kendrick, better known as Eddie Kendricks, was an American tenor singer and songwriter. Noted for his distinctive falsetto singing style, Kendricks co-founded the Motown singing group the Temptations, and was one of their lead singers from 1961 until 1971. He was the lead voice on such famous songs as "The Way You Do the Things You Do", "Get Ready", and "Just My Imagination ". As a solo artist, Kendricks recorded several hits of his own during the 1970s including the number-one single "Keep On Truckin'" and the number-two single "Boogie Down."

Jacques Offenbach was a German-born French composer, cellist and impresario. He is remembered for his nearly 100 operettas of the 1850s to the 1870s, and his uncompleted opera The Tales of Hoffmann. He was a powerful influence on later composers of the operetta genre, particularly Franz von Suppé, Johann Strauss II and Arthur Sullivan. His best-known works were continually revived during the 20th century, and many of his operettas continue to be staged in the 21st. The Tales of Hoffmann remains part of the standard opera repertory.

Seymour Roger Cray was an American electrical engineer, computer scientist, mathematician, and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research, which built many of these machines. Called "the father of supercomputing", Cray has been credited with creating the supercomputer industry. Joel S. Birnbaum, then chief technology officer of Hewlett-Packard, said of him: "It seems impossible to exaggerate the effect he had on the industry; many of the things that high performance computers now do routinely were at the farthest edge of credibility when Seymour envisioned them." Larry Smarr, then director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois said that Cray is "the Thomas Edison of the supercomputing industry."

Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn al-Hasan al-Mustaḍīʾ, better known by his laqab al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh or simply as al-Nasir, was the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad from 1180 until his death. His laqab literally can mean The One who Gives Victory to the Religion of God. He continued the efforts of his grandfather al-Muqtafi in restoring the caliphate to its ancient dominant role and achieved a surprising amount of success as his army even conquered parts of Iran. According to the historian, Angelika Hartmann, al-Nasir was the last effective Abbasid caliph. He was able to gain full control over Mesopotamia after 200 years of nominal rule by the Abbasids since the overtake in 945 by the Shia Buyids and later the Seljuks.

Grace Lee Boggs was an American author, social activist, philosopher, and feminist. She is known for her years of political collaboration with C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s she and her husband, James Boggs, took their own political direction, turning their focus to civil rights and Black Liberation, Asian American, and other social justice movements. By 1998 she had written four books, including an autobiography. In 2011, still active at the age of 95, she wrote a fifth book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, with Scott Kurashige, published by the University of California Press. She is regarded as a key figure in the Asian American, Black Power, and Civil Rights movements.

Ceferino "Joker" Paz Arroyo Jr. was a Filipino statesman and key figure in the 1986 EDSA People Power Revolution that ousted dictator Ferdinand Marcos. He was a Congressman for Makati from 1992 to 2001 and Senator from 2001 to 2013. Arroyo received various awards and commendations for his significant contributions to the law profession and public service. Among these are the Philippine Bar Association's Most Distinguished Award for Justice as a "man beholden to no one except to his country" and Senate Resolution No. 100 enacted in the 8th Congress citing his invaluable service to the Filipino people. He was also known for being the thriftiest legislator, earning the title of "Scrooge of Congress", as he only had few staff members without bodyguards and did not use his pork barrel funds. In 2018, Arroyo was identified by the Human Rights Victims' Claims Board as a Motu proprio human rights violations victim of the Martial Law Era.

Clifton Curtis Williams Jr., was an American naval aviator, test pilot, mechanical engineer, major in the United States Marine Corps, and NASA astronaut, who was killed in a plane crash; he never went into space. The crash was caused by a mechanical failure in a NASA T-38 jet trainer, which he was piloting to visit his parents in Mobile, Alabama. The failure caused the flight controls to stop responding, and although he activated the ejection seat, it did not save him. He was the fourth astronaut from NASA's Astronaut Group 3 to have died, the first two having been killed in separate T-38 flights, and the third in the Apollo 1 fire earlier that year. The aircraft crashed in Florida near Tallahassee within an hour of departing Patrick AFB.

Dorothea Klumpke Roberts was an American astronomer. In 1893, she became the first woman to earn a doctorate degree at the Sorbonne University. She joined the Paris Observatory where her work consisted of measuring star positions, processing astrophotographs, and studying stellar spectra and meteorites. She was later appointed director of the observatory's Bureau of Measurements, a position she held for ten years. She married the amateur astronomer Isaac Roberts in 1901 and left the observatory to help him photograph all 52 of William Herschel's "areas of nebulosity". Following his death, she compiled and published a catalogue of his work. In 1934, Klumpke was honored by the French president as a knight of the Legion of Honor.

Joachim Patinir, also called Patenier, was a Flemish Renaissance painter of history and landscape subjects. He was born in Wallonia, but in his mature career worked in Antwerp, then the centre of the art market in the Low Countries. Patinir was a pioneer of landscape as an independent genre and he was the first Netherlandish painter to regard himself primarily as a landscape painter. He effectively invented the world landscape, a distinct style of panoramic northern Renaissance landscapes which is Patinir's important contribution to Western art. His work marks an important stage in the development of the representation of perspective in landscape painting.

Antonio Hipolito Peña Herrada was a Mexican professional wrestling promoter who founded the Asistencia Asesoría y Administración (AAA) promotion in 1992. Peña's promotion reached its height of popularity in the early 1990s prior to the 1994 downturn of the Mexican economy, but continues to operate. Peña's AAA is the promotion largely responsible for bringing the lucha libre style to the United States, with AAA wrestlers such as Rey Misterio Jr., Psicosis, La Parka, Konnan and others eventually competing for American promotions.

Michael Joseph Mansfield was an American Democratic Party politician and diplomat who represented Montana in the United States House of Representatives from 1943 to 1953 and United States Senate from 1953 to 1977. As the leader of the Senate Democratic Caucus from 1961 to 1977, Mansfield shepherded Great Society programs through the Senate; his tenure of exactly sixteen years was the longest of any party leader in Senate history, until the record was broken by Mitch McConnell in 2023.

Louis Dembitz Brandeis was an American lawyer who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1916 to 1939. Brandeis was a leading figure in the antitrust movement at the turn of the 20th century, particularly in his resistance to the monopolization of the New England railroad. His anti-monopolistic jurisprudence laid the intellectual foundation for the New Brandeis movement, a contemporary revival of antitrust thought spearheaded by figures such as Lina Khan and Tim Wu.

Thomas Clark Durant was an American physician, businessman, and financier who played a central role in the formation of the Union Pacific Railroad. He was vice-president of the Union Pacific in 1869 when it met with the Central Pacific Railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory. He created the financial structure that led to the Crédit Mobilier scandal. He was interested in hotels in the Adirondacks and once owned the schooner-yacht Idler, a successful America’s Cup defender.

Friedrich "Fritz" Heinrich Lewy, known in his later years as Frederic Henry Lewey, was a German-born American neurologist. He is best known for the discovery of Lewy bodies, which are a characteristic indicator of Parkinson's disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. In a 1912 paper based on work in Alois Alzheimer’s Munich laboratory he described intraneuronal inclusion bodies in brainstem nuclei of patients with paralysis agitans that were later termed Lewy bodies.

Samuel Louis Warner was an American film producer who was the co-founder and chief executive officer of Warner Bros. He established the studio along with his brothers Harry, Albert, and Jack L. Warner. Sam Warner is credited with procuring the technology that enabled Warner Bros. to produce the film industry's first feature-length talking picture, The Jazz Singer. He died in 1927, on the day before the film's enormously successful premiere.

Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins was a New Zealand-born British biophysicist and Nobel laureate whose research spanned multiple areas of physics and biophysics, contributing to the scientific understanding of phosphorescence, isotope separation, optical microscopy, and X-ray diffraction. He is most noted for initiating and leading early X-ray diffraction studies on DNA at King's College London, and for his pivotal role in enabling the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA.

Tecumseh was a Shawnee chief and warrior who promoted resistance to the expansion of the United States onto Native American lands. A persuasive orator, Tecumseh traveled widely, forming a Native American confederacy and promoting intertribal unity. Even though his efforts to unite Native Americans ended with his death in battle during the War of 1812, he became a folk hero in American, Indigenous, and Canadian popular history.