Deaths in February 1983

Contents

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The following is a list of notable deaths in February 1983.

Entries for each day are listed alphabetically by surname. A typical entry lists information in the following sequence:

• Name, age, country of citizenship at birth, subsequent country of citizenship (if applicable), reason for notability, cause of death (if known), and reference.

February 1983

1

• Elena Fiore, 68, Italian actress^[1]

3

• Josephine Dunn, 76, American actress, cancer^[2]

4

Karen Carpenter

• Jim Ameche, 67, American actor, lung cancer^[3][4]
• Karen Carpenter, 32, American musician, she served as the lead vocalist and the drummer of the sibling duo the Carpenters, ^[5]death from cardiac arrest, ^[6]officially attributed to "emetine cardiotoxicity due to or as a consequence of anorexia nervosa"^[5]
• Reginald Denham, 89, English playwright, screenwriter, theatre and film director, actor and film producer, stroke^[7]

8

• Charlotte Francis, 79, English actress and playwright^[8][9]

9

• Zinaida Semyonovna Brumberg, 82, Soviet animation director, animator, and screenwriter, one of the pioneers of the Soviet animation industry^[10][11]

10

• Eduard Franz, 80, American actor^[12]

12

• Eubie Blake, 96, American pianist and composer of ragtime, jazz, and popular music, pneumonia^[13]

13

• Marian Nixon, 78, American actress, identified as a WAMPAS Baby Star in 1924, ^[14]post-surgery complications following an open heart surgery^[15]

16

• Florence Hall, 94, American civil servant who was chief of the Women's Land Army^[16]

19

• Charles Bluhdorn, 56, Austrian-born American industrialist, owner of the conglomerate Gulf and Western Industries^[17] and chairman of its subsidiary film studio Paramount Pictures, ^[18]heart attack during a return flight on his corporate jet^[19]
• Alice White, 78, American actress, complications from a stroke^[20]

20

• Caryl Lincoln, 79, American actress, she was selected as a WAMPAS Baby Star in 1929^[21]
• Ray Vitte, 33, American actor, death from sickle cell disease^[22] while held in police custody^[23][24]

22

• Sir Adrian Boult, 93, British conductor, founder and chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, director of music for the BBC^[25][26]
• Georg Rydeberg, 75, Swedish actor^[27]

23

• Herbert Howells, 90, English composer, organist, and teacher, known for his large output of Anglican church music^[28]

24

• Roy Krenkel, 64, American illustrator, specialist in fantasy and historical drawings and paintings^[29]

25

• Mignon Anderson, 90, American actress.^[30]
• Tennessee Williams, 71, American playwright and screenwriter, death from a toxic level of secobarbital while ingesting barbiturates^[31]

27

• Nikolai Aleksandrovich Kozyrev, 74, Soviet astronomer and astrophysicist, ^[32]primarily known for his 1958 observation of the transient lunar phenomenon in the crater Alphonsus on the Moon

28

• Winifred Atwell, c. 73, Trinidad and Tobago-born British composer and pianist, known for a series of boogie-woogie and ragtime hits, selling over 20 million records^[33][34][35]

Specific date unknown

• Helen Ogger, 73, American inker and cartoonist, worked in the Ink and Paint Department of the Walt Disney Animation Studios throughout the 1930s, she applied the dye used for Snow White's blush^[36]

References

1. Enrico Lancia, Roberto Poppi. "Fiore, Elena". Le attrici: dal 1930 ai giorni nostri. Gremese Editore, 2003.
2. Ellenberger, Allan R. (2001). Celebrities in Los Angeles Cemeteries: A Directory. McFarland. p. 210. ISBN 9780786450190. Retrieved October 8, 2017.
3. Cox, Jim (2008). This Day in Network Radio: A Daily Calendar of Births, Debuts, Cancellations and Other Events in Broadcasting History. McFarland & Company, Inc. ISBN 978-0-7864-3848-8. Page 29.
4. "Jim Ameche, radio actor for 40 years". Chicago Tribune. February 6, 1983. Retrieved August 22, 2016.
5. Randy Schmidt (October 24, 2010). "Karen Carpenter's tragic story". The Guardian. Retrieved November 14, 2022.
6. Seiler, Michael (February 5, 1983). "Singer Karen Carpenter Dies of Heart Failure". Los Angeles Times. pp. 1, 23.
7. "Reginald Denham, 89; playwright€ actor, longtime theatrical director". The Boston Globe. February 8, 1993. p. 61. Retrieved August 23, 2025 – via Newspapers.com.
8. "Jean Jay". BFI Film Forever. Archived from the original on December 30, 2017. Retrieved February 2, 2018.
9. Gale, Maggie Barbara (1996). West End Women: Women and the London Stage, 1918–1962. Taylor & Francis. p. 230. ISBN 9780415084963. Retrieved January 28, 2018. Listed as "Charlotte Frances"
10. Giannalberto Bendazzi (2016). Animation: A World History: Volume I: Foundations - The Golden Age at Google Books, p. 177
11. Sergey Kapkov (2006). Encyclopedia of Domestic Animation, pp. 129–130, 14
12. "Character Actor Eduard Franz Dies at 80". The Los Angeles Times. February 15, 1983. p. 19. Retrieved March 31, 2021.
13. Koenig, Karl. "The Life of Eubie Blake". Maryland Historical Society. Archived from the original on September 27, 2007. Retrieved February 17, 2007.
14. Lowe, Denise (2004). An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Women in Early American Films, 1895-1930. Haworth Press. p. 404. ISBN 0-7890-1842-X.
15. "Marian Nixon, Debuted in Tom Mix's 'Riders'". Chicago Tribune. Chicago, IL. February 16, 1983. p. 12. Retrieved November 30, 2022 – via Newspapers.com.
16. "Florence L. Hall, 94, Worked for Agriculture". The Washington Post. February 21, 1983.
17. "Who's Who in Ridgefield CT A-F". Retrieved November 29, 2010.
18. Diller, Barry (May 20, 2025). Who Knew. Simon & Schuster. p. 105-118. Retrieved August 29, 2025.
19. Blair, William G. (February 20, 1983). "Charles G. Bluhdorn, the Head of Gulf + Western, Dies at 56". The New York Times. Retrieved May 2, 2022.
20. "Actress Alice White dead at 76". United Press International. February 25, 1983. Retrieved August 8, 2024.
21. Liebman 2000, pp. 122–124.
22. Siegel, Lee (April 20, 1983). "Actor Raymond Vitte - Cell disease death cause, coroner says". The Desert Sun. Palm Springs. Retrieved July 30, 2023.
23. "Actor Raymond Vitte, who died minutes after a weekend..." United Press International. February 22, 1983. Retrieved July 30, 2023.
24. Barabak, Mark (February 22, 1983). "Actor Raymond Vitte dies in police scuffle". United Press International. Retrieved January 17, 2020.
25. Kennedy, Michael. "Boult, Sir Adrian Cedric (1889–1983)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 1 March 2010. (subscription required)
26. The Times obituary of Adrian Boult, 24 February 1983, p. 12
27. Georg Rydeberg
28. Spicer (2004). "Howells, Herbert Norman (1892–1983)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/31257. (Subscription, Wikipedia Library access or UK public library membership required.)
29. "Roy G. Krenkel". lambiek.net.
30. Slide, Anthony (2010). Silent Players: A Biographical and Autobiographical Study of 100 Silent Film Actors and Actresses. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0813127088. Retrieved January 16, 2018.
31. Lahr, John (2014). Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. pp. 587–588. ISBN 978-0-393-02124-0.
32. Dobbins, Thomas A.; Sheehan, William (2007), "Kozyrev, Nikolai Alexandrovich", in Hockey, Thomas; Trimble, Virginia; Williams, Thomas R.; Bracher, Katherine (eds.), The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, New York, NY: Springer, pp. 654–655, doi:10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7_797, ISBN 978-0-387-30400-7
33. "Atwell, Winifred", in David Dabydeen, John Gilmore, Cecily Jones (eds), The Oxford Companion to Black British History, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 33.
34. "Atwell, (Una) Winifred (c. 1913–1983)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/58882. (Subscription, Wikipedia Library access or UK public library membership required.)
35. Colin Larkin, ed. (2002). The Virgin Encyclopedia of Fifties Music (Third ed.). Virgin Books. p. 23. ISBN 1-85227-937-0.
36. Johnson, David (1988). "Not Rouge, Mr. Thomas!". Animation Artist Magazine. Archived from the original on May 10, 2000.

Sources

• Kennedy, Michael (1987). Adrian Boult. London: Hamish Hamilton. ISBN 0-333-48752-4.
• Lahr, John. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh. W. W. Norton & Co. New York. Print. 2014. ISBN 978-0-393-02124-0.
• Liebman, Roy (2000). The Wampas Baby Stars: A Biographical Dictionary, 1922–1934. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-0756-5.

External links

• List of February 1983 deaths at IMDb