Tag: obituary

Former French president Jacques Chirac, who led from 1995 to 2007, has died aged 86. Chirac had one of the longest…

A former Dutch prisoner of war on the island of Java, Jan Ruff-O’Herne, has died after spending her later years…

Franco Zeffirelli, the Italian director of operas, films and television, has died in Rome aged 96.  In a career spanning…

Luxembourg’s Grand Duke Jean, who helped transform the tiny state into an affluent financial centre before handing the crown to…

Italian movie maker and Cannes Film Festival winner Vittorio Taviani (pictured) has died aged 88. He and his brother Paolo…

Czech filmmaker Milos Forman, whose movies One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus won several Academy Awards, including best…

A former Nazi SS guard, labelled “the bookkeeper of Auschwitz” by the media, has died in hospital before serving a…

Coco Schumann, a Holocaust survivor who became one of Germany’s most celebrated jazz musicians with the Coco Schumann Quartet, has…

Ingvar Kamprad (pictured), the billionaire founder of Ikea, has died at his home in southern Sweden following a short illness…

King Michael of Romania (pictured), who has died aged 96, game to the throne in 1927, aged five, reigned until…

Mafia “boss of bosses” Salvatore “Toto” Riina, who was serving 26 life sentences as the mastermind of a strategy to…

Czech harpsichordist Zuzana Ruzickova, a Holocaust survivor who became the first soloist to record Johann Sebastian Bach’s complete works for…

On September 26, 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, then 44, was on overnight duty at Serpukhov-15, a bunker southwest of…

Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the architect of German reunification, has died aged 87.  “We mourn,” Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union…

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (pictured with Richard Nixon in 1972. ), the poet whose defiant verse inspired many young Russians to oppose Stalinism,…