Notable Deaths on September 26

Daniel Boone was an American pioneer and frontiersman whose adventures made him one of the first folk heroes of the United States. He became famous for his exploration and settlement of Kentucky, which was then beyond the western borders of the Thirteen Colonies. In 1775, under commission from Judge Richard Henderson's Transylvania Company, Boone blazed the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap and into Kentucky in the face of resistance from nearby Indian tribes. He founded Boonesborough, one of the first English-speaking settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains. By the end of the 18th century, more than 200,000 people had entered Kentucky by following the route marked by Boone.

Alberto Pincherle, known by his pseudonym Alberto Moravia, was an Italian novelist and journalist. His novels explored matters of modern sexuality, social alienation and existentialism. Moravia is best known for his debut novel Gli indifferenti and for the anti-fascist novel Il conformista, the basis for the film The Conformist (1970) directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Other novels of his adapted for the cinema are Agostino, filmed with the same title by Mauro Bolognini in 1962; Il disprezzo, filmed by Jean-Luc Godard as Le Mépris ; La noia (Boredom), filmed with that title by Damiano Damiani in 1963 and released in the US as The Empty Canvas in 1964 and La ciociara, filmed by Vittorio De Sica as Two Women (1960). Cédric Kahn's L'Ennui (1998) is another version of La noia.

Gloria Frances Stuart was an American actress, visual artist and activist. She was known for her roles in pre-code films, and garnered renewed fame late in life for her portrayal of Rose Dawson Calvert in James Cameron's epic romance Titanic (1997), one of the highest-grossing films of all time. Her performance in the film won her a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role and earned her nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture.

Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer, pianist and ethnomusicologist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century; he and Franz Liszt are regarded as Hungary's greatest composers. Among his notable works are the opera Bluebeard's Castle, the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, the Concerto for Orchestra and six string quartets. Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which later became known as ethnomusicology. Per Anthony Tommasini, Bartók "has empowered generations of subsequent composers to incorporate folk music and classical traditions from whatever culture into their works," and was "a formidable modernist who in the face of Schoenberg’s breathtaking formulations showed another way, forging a language that was an amalgam of tonality, unorthodox scales and atonal wanderings." His work is often described as being a combination of traditional peasants' folk music and avant-garde music.

Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike, also known as "The Silver Bell of Asia", was a Ceylonese statesman who served as the fourth Prime Minister of the Dominion of Ceylon, from 1956 until his assassination in 1959. The founder of the left-wing and Sinhalese nationalist Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), he was elected the fourth Prime Minister of Ceylon after creating a powerful coalition called the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna and contesting on the lines of Sinhalese nationalism and democratic socialism. He achieved a landslide victory over the ruling United National Party in the general elections in 1956.

Baden Powell de Aquino, known professionally as Baden Powell, was a Brazilian virtuoso guitarist and composer. He combined classical techniques with popular harmony and swing. He performed in many styles, including bossa nova, samba, Brazilian jazz, Latin jazz and MPB. He performed on stage during most of his lifetime. Powell composed many pieces for guitar, some of them now considered guitar standards, such as Abração em Madrid, Braziliense, Canto de Ossanha, Casa Velha, Consolação, Horizon, Imagem, Lotus, Samba, Samba em Prelúdio, Samba Triste, Simplesmente, Tristeza e Solidão, and Samba da Benção. He released Os Afro-sambas, a watershed album in MPB, with Vinicius de Moraes in 1966. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest Brazilian guitar players of all time.

Terry Newton was an English professional rugby league footballer who played as a hooker. He began his professional career with Leeds Rhinos in 1996, before joining his hometown club Wigan Warriors in 2000. He later also played for Bradford Bulls and Wakefield Trinity Wildcats. During his career, he won two Challenge Cup medals and was a runner-up in four Super League Grand Finals. He was one of a handful of players to feature in each of the first 15 seasons of the Super League. At international level, he was capped 15 times by Great Britain between 1998 and 2007, and also represented England and Lancashire.

Samuel Steiger was an American politician, journalist, political pundit. He served five terms as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, two terms in the Arizona State Senate, and one term as mayor of Prescott, Arizona. Steiger also made an unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate, served as a special assistant to Arizona Governor Evan Mecham, and hosted political talk shows on both radio and television. Despite these accomplishments, Steiger is best known for two incidents: one, while he was a sitting congressman, was the 1975 killing of two burros; the second was painting a crosswalk between Prescott's courthouse and nearby Whiskey Row.

John Oliver Curran MRIA was an Irish physician, medical writer and reviewer. He studied at the University of Glasgow and Trinity College Dublin, trained at the Meath Hospital, Jervis Street Hospital and St Vincent's Hospital, and later taught medicine at the Apothecaries' Hall School, Dublin. He was also a physician to the Dublin General Dispensary. He was a lifelong vegetarian, having abstained from meat from early childhood, and also avoided eggs, cheese, tea and coffee. During the 1847 fever epidemic in Dublin, he criticised conditions in fever hospitals. He died of typhus after nursing the French medical commissioner Henri Gueneau de Mussy.

René Rivera, known professionally as Mario Montez, was one of the Warhol superstars, appearing in thirteen of Andy Warhol's underground films from 1964 to 1966. He took his name as a male homage to the actress Maria Montez, an important gay icon in the 1950s and 1960s. Before appearing in Warhol's films, he appeared in Jack Smith's underground films Flaming Creatures and Normal Love. Montez also stars in the Ron Rice film Chumlum, made in 1964. Mario Montez, was "a staple in the New York underground scene of the 1960s and '70s."

Azizan bin Abdul Razak was a Malaysian politician who served as the 10th Menteri Besar of the state of Kedah from 2008 to 2013. A member of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), he was the first Chief Minister of Kedah from a party other than the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO). He held the seat of Sungai Limau in the Kedah state assembly from 2004 until his death in 2013. He was also the state commissioner for PAS in Kedah and a member of the central committee of the national party.

Hermann Günther Grassmann was a German polymath known in his day as a linguist and now also as a mathematician. He was also a physicist, general scholar, and publisher. His mathematical work was little noted until he was in his sixties. His work preceded and exceeded the concept which is now known as a vector space. He introduced the Grassmannian, the space which parameterizes all k-dimensional linear subspaces of an n-dimensional vector space V. In linguistics he helped free language history and structure from each other.

Hemanta Mukhopadhyay, known professionally as Hemanta Mukherjee and Hemant Kumar, was an Indian music director and a playback singer who primarily sang in Bengali and Hindi, along with several other Indian languages, including Marathi, Gujarati, Odia, Assamese, Tamil, Punjabi, Bhojpuri, Konkani, Sanskrit and Urdu. He was an artist in Bengali and Hindi film music, Rabindra Sangeet, and various other genres. He was the recipient of two National Awards for Best Male Playback Singer and was popularly known as the "Voice of God".

Eugene Dominic Genovese was an American historian of the American South and American slavery. He was noted for bringing a Marxist perspective to the study of power, class and relations between planters and slaves in the South. His book Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made won the Bancroft Prize. He wrote during the Cold War; his political beliefs were viewed by some as highly controversial at the time. He later abandoned the left and Marxism and embraced traditionalist conservatism.

Bessie Smith was an African-American blues singer widely renowned during the Jazz Age. Nicknamed the "Empress of the Blues" and formerly Queen of the Blues, she was the most popular female blues singer of the 1930s. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, she is often regarded as one of the greatest singers of her era and was a major influence on fellow blues singers, as well as jazz vocalists.

Lieutenant General Sir Leslie James Morshead, was an Australian soldier, teacher, businessman, and farmer, whose military career spanned both world wars. During the Second World War, he led the Australian and British troops at the Siege of Tobruk (1941) and at the Second Battle of El Alamein, achieving decisive victories over Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps. His soldiers nicknamed him "Ming the Merciless", later simply "Ming", after the villain in the Flash Gordon comics.

The Taichang Emperor, personal name Zhu Changluo, was the 15th emperor of the Ming dynasty of China. He was the eldest son of the Wanli Emperor and succeeded his father as emperor in 1620. His reign came to an abrupt end less than one month after his enthronement when he was found dead one morning in the palace following a bout of diarrhea. His reign was the shortest in Ming history.

Hugh John Lofting was an English-American writer, trained as a civil engineer, who created the classic children's literature character Doctor Dolittle. The fictional physician talking to animals, based in an English village, first appeared in illustrated letters to his children which Lofting sent from British Army trenches in the First World War. Lofting settled in the United States soon after the war and before his first book was published.

Leopold Ružička was a Croatian-Swiss scientist and joint winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his work on polymethylenes and higher terpenes" "including the first chemical synthesis of male sex hormones." He worked most of his life in Switzerland, and received eight doctorates honoris causa in science, medicine, and law; seven prizes and medals; and twenty-four honorary memberships in chemical, biochemical, and other scientific societies.