Here's an arbitrary list of famous people who've died in 2008.
Names in bold were on someone's list.

• Princess Galyani Vadhana, elder sister of Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej
• Choi Yo-sam, 35, Korean boxer (Go Fish, Goatsucker)
• George MacDonald Fraser, creator of the Flashman books
• Sir Edmund Hillary, first to climb Mount Everest
• Carl Karcher, founded Carl's Jr
• Maila Nurmi, actress who created the character Vampira in the 1959s. She was 86.
• Joyce Carlson, co-creator of Disneyland's "It's a Small World"
• Shu Uemura, famed makeup artist
• Gerry Staley, all-star pitcher who comiled 54 wins with the St Louis Cardinals from 1951 - 53
• Philip Agee, renegade former CIA agent whose naming of agency operatives prompted a U.S. law against exposing government spies
• George Moore, 84, Australia's greatest jockey with 119 wins (Raven)
• Eddie "Bozo" Miller, champion eater
• Sergei Larin, 51, tenor (Molly Bloom, the Dog of Doom)
• Brad Renfro, actor
• Richard Knerr, co-founder of Wham-O inc, which brought us the Hula Hoop and the Frisbee
• Marty Links (real name Martha Arguello), cartoonist who did "Bobby Sox" and "Emmy Lou"
• Bobby Fischer, chess grand master and nut
• Georgia Frontiere, 80, co-owner of the Rams (Go Fish, Team Dirt)
• Allan Melvin, actor who played Sam the Butcher on "The Brady Bunch"
• Suzanne Pleshette, 70 (Already Dead, Deadbeats, Go Fish, Joe R., Karen, Megahurts, Putnam's Tomahawk Chop, Raven)
• Don Wittman, 71, Canadian sportscaster (Already Dead, Go Fish, Putnam's Tomahawk Chop)
• John Stewart, singer-songwriter who was with the Kingston Trio; wrote "Daydream Believer"
• Louis de Cazenave, World War I veteran age 110. This leaves just one known French survivor of that war.
• Lovie Yancey, founder of the Fatburgert restaurant chain
• Heath Ledger, actor
• Miles Lerman, fought against the Nazis in Poland and later helped found the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC
• Richard Darman, 64, served under five presidents, most notably Director of the Office of Mangement and Budget under George H. W. Bush (Go Fish)
• Kenneth Parnell, kidnapper of Steven Stayner and Timmy White
• Christian Brando, son of Marlon who was convicted of killing his sister's boyfriend
• Suharto, 86, president of Indonesia (The Dead Hunter, Refr' Madness VI: The Undiscovered Cadaver, Team Dirt)
• Archbishop Christodoulos,69 , leader of the Greek Orthodox Church (Goatsucker, Putnam's Tomahawk Chop, Raven, Team Dirt)
• Gordon B. Hinckley, president of the Mormon Church
• Margaret Truman, presidential daughter and mystery writer
• Gus Arriola, creator of "Gordo" comic strip

• Earl Butz, 98, Secretary of Agriculture under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, probably best known for publicly telling a racist joke in 1976 which led to his resignation (Refr' Madness VI: The Undiscovered Cadaver)
• Barry Morse, actor who played Lt. Girard who chased Dr. Richard Kimble all over the country
• Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who introduced transcendental meditation to the Beatles and the world
• Phyllis Whitney, 104, author of romantic mysteries and young adult novels (Team Dirt)
• Roy Scheider, 75, actor who played the police chief in Jaws and the progagonist in All That Jazz (Bloody Mary, Tweaked)
• Tom Lantos, Congressional representative from California
• Alain Robbe-Grillet, novelist, filmmaker, screenwriter
• David Groh, actor who played Rhoda Morgenstern's husband
• Robin Moore, author of The French Connection, The Happy Hooker, and The Green Berets, for which he also penned "The Ballad of the Green Berets"
• William F. Buckley, 82, Conservative writer and talk show guest (Molly Bloom, the Dog of Doom)
• Myron Cope, former Pittsburth Steelers announcer known for his screechy voice and for creating the Terrible Towel
• Larry Norman, 60, singer, songwriter, and producer of Christian music (HoulaGrrl)
• Buddy Miles, drummer for Jimi Hendrix and others, vocalist of the California Raisins
• Mike Smith, lead singer and keyboardist for the Dave Clark Five

• Jeff Healey, 41, blind Canadian guitarist (Go Fish)
• Giuseppe Di Stefano, 86, Italian tenor (Molly Bloom, the Dog of Doom)
• Barbara Seaman, writer and womens' health advocate who wrote The Doctors' Case Against the Pill and other books about womens' health. She also wrote a fascinating biography, Lovely Me: The Life of Jacqueline Susann .
• Norman Smith, lead recording engineer for every Beatles song through 1965 and who discovered Pink Floyd
• Gary Gygax, co-creator of that Satanic game Dungeons & Dragons
• Lazare Ponticelli, last French WWI veteran, age 110
• Ola Brunkert, drummer for Abba
• Anthony Minghella, film director (The English Patient, Çold Mountain)
• Vicki Van Meter, piloted a plane across the country at age 11 in 1993 and across Atlantic Ocean at age 12
• Arthur C. Clarke, 90, science fiction writer (2001: A Space Odyssey, Childhood's End) (Lisa)
• Israel "Cachao" Lopez, mambo pioneer
• Neil Aspinall, the Beatles' former road manager and their longtime friend and consigliere
• John E. List, former Sunday school teacher who was on the run for more than 17 years after he killed his entire family
• Paul Scofield, British actor who won an Academy Award for his role in A Man for All Seasons
• Richard Widmark, 93, American actor (Eternity Tours )
• Al Copeland, 64, founded Popye's Chicken (Putnam's Tomahawk Chop)
• Marvin D. McKee, undertaker who in 1959 prepared the bodies of Buddy Holly and Ritche Valens after the plane crash that killed them
• Herb Petersen, 89, invented the Egg McMuffin and helped McDonalds get into the breakfast market
• Abby Mann, screenwriter who won an Academy Award for Judgment at Nuremburg

• Max Helton, 67, founder of the Motor Racing Outreach ministry (Putnam's Tomahawk Chop)
• Dith Pran, photojournalist for The New York Timse whose ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodi was made into a 1984 movie
• Jules Dassin, film director known for Rififi, Topkapi, and Never On Sunday, married to Melina Mercouri
• Klaus Dinger, drummerfor Kraftwerk
• Wayne "Frosty Freeze" Frost, break dancer and b-boy
• Charlton Heston, 84, actor and NRA president (The Dead Hunter, Deadbeats, Eternity Tours , MCR , Stiff Competition, Toast, Tweaked)
• Stanley Kemel, actor who portrayed the psychiatrist on "Monk"
• John A. Wheeler, physicist who coined the term "black hole"
• Ollie Johnson, last of the original Disney animators; he worked on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Bambi, Fantasia, and others
• Hazel Court, English actress who co-starred with Boris Karloff and Vincent Price in horror movies in the '50s and '60s
• Edward Lorenz, MIT meteorologist who orgiginated chaos theory, which holds that small differences in the initial conditions of a system can have outsized impacts on its functioning, a phenomenon also called the "butterfly effect."
• Ivan Dixon, black actor who had a regular role on "Hogan's Heroes"
• Danny Federici, 58, the longtime keyboard player for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (Marilyn, Putnam's Tomahawk Chop)
• Joe Feeney, Nebraska-born tenor who sang "Danny Boy" and such standards for 25 years on the Lawrence Welk Show
• Daniel Lee Siebert, 53, Alabama serial killer (Goatsucker, Raven)
• Enrico Donati, Italian-born American painter and sculptor considered by many in the art world to be the last of th Surrealists
• Jim Hager, one of the Hager Twins from "Hee Haw"
• Albert Hofmann, 102, inventor of LSD (Refr' Madness VI: The Undiscovered Cadaver)

• Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the "DC Madam" convicted escort service operator
• Ted May, cartoonist who created "Hazel" and Peabody and Sherman
• Mildred Loving, of Loving v. Virginia, case that struck down miscegenation law
• Irvine Robbins, founder of Baskin-Robbins ice cream
• Beverlee McKinsey, soap opera actress known for two long-running roles: Iris Carrington on "Another World" in the 1970s and Alexandra Spaulding on "Guiding LIght" in the 1980s
• Eddy Arnold, country singer ("Make the World Go Away")
• Bill Hargrove, recognized last year as the country's oldest league bowler, at 106
• Nuala O'Faolain, Irish novelist
• Leyla Gencer, 83, Turkish operatic soprano (Molly Bloom, the Dog of Doom)
• Irene Sendler (Irena Sendlerowa), 98, Polish social worker nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for saving 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto by getting them false documents and sheltering them in individual and group homes (Refr' Madness VI: The Undiscovered Cadaver)
• John Phillip Law, actor best known for playing a blind angel opposite Jane Fonda in Barbarella
• Robert Rauschenberg, American modern artist
• Larry McKeon, 63, the first openly gay politician in the Illinois general assembly where he served in the House of Representatives (Go Fish)
• Will Elder, MAD Magazine and Playboy artist, creator of "Little Annie Fannie"
• Robert Mondavi, winemaker
• Huntington Hartford II, A&P heir who lost most of his money chasing his dreams as an entrepeneur and art patron
• John Rutsey, original drummer for Rush
• Hamilton Jordon, Jimmy Carter's chief strategist and chief of staff
• Robert Asprin, science fiction author (the Myth Adventure series and many others)
• Utah Phillips, folk singer and story teller
• Dick Martin, 86, commedian and host of "Laugh-In" (MCR )
• Thelma Keane, inspiration for "Mommy" in the comic created by her husband Bill Keane, "The Family Circus"
• J.R. Simplot, made millions by selling potatoes to McDonalds and started one of the world's biggest computer chip makers, Micron Technology
• Sydney Pollack, 73, director and actor (Already Dead, Go Fish, Goatsucker, HoulaGrrl, Tweaked)
• Earle Hagen, TV music composer ("I Spy", "The Andy Griffin Show")
• Joseph Pevney, directed 14 episodes of "Star Trek" including "The Trouble with Tribblse"
• Alexander Courage, wrote the original "Star Trek" theme
• Harvey Korman, 81 (Toast)
• Fredric J. Baur, designed Pringles potato chip can and had some of his ashes buried in one

• Yves St Laurent, 71 (Go Fish, Lizzie, Tweaked)
• Bo Diddley, 79, rock and roll pioneer (Marilyn)
• Alton Kelley, half of the Kelley / Mouse San Francisco poster team
• Paula Gunn Allen, Native American poet and teacher
• Paul Sills, founder of Second City
• Mel Ferrer, actor
• Harriet McBryde Johnson, disability and civil rights activist
• Jim McKay, 86, Wide World of Sports icon (Marilyn)
• Bob Anderson, playedthe young George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life
• Vo Van Kiet, former Vietnamese Prime Minister wholed the country's economic reforms in the 1990s
• Timm Russert, Washington Bureau chief for NBC News, hosted "Meet the Press"
• Stan Winston, special effects guy who worked on Aliens and Jurassic Park
• Eric Wujcik, 57, game designer (Goatsucker)
• Charlie Jones, veteran sportscaster
• Tyrone Jones, 46, football player (Already Dead, Deadbeats, Goatsucker, Hell's Little Angel, Team Dirt)
• Cyd Charisse, dancer
• Kermit Scott, the man believed to be the inspiration for Kermit the Frog
• Tasha Tudor, chidren's book illustrator who emulated 19th century life
• Scott Kalitta, race driver
• George Carlin, comedian
• Dody Goodman, comedian and actress
• Kermit Love, Muppet designer (Big Bird, among others)
• Leonid Hurwicz, who became the oldest Nobel laureate after receiving the economics prize last year, 90

Last updated June 29, 2008. Labels by Warning Label Generator.

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