Deaths
- 11 January - Barbara Pym, novelist (born 1913)
- 18 January - Sir Cecil Beaton, photographer (born 1904)
- 17 February - Graham Sutherland, artist (born 1903)
- 1 March - Dixie Dean, football player (born 1907)
- 29 April - Alfred Hitchcock, film director (born 1899)
- 14 May - Hugh Griffith, actor (born 1912)
- 18 May - Ian Curtis, musician and singer (Joy Division) (born 1956)
- 7 June - Elizabeth Craig, writer (born 1883)
- 12 June - Billy Butlin, founder of Butlins (born 1899, South Africa)
- 23 June - John Laurie, actor (born 1897)
- 1 July - C. P. Snow, novelist and physicist (born 1905)
- 24 July - Peter Sellers, actor (born 1925)
- 26 July - Kenneth Tynan, theatre critic (born 1927)
- 24 August - Yootha Joyce, actress (born 1927)
- 25 September - John Bonham, drummer (Led Zeppelin) (born 1948)
- 6 October - Hattie Jacques, Carry On films actress (heart attack) (born 1922)
- 4 November - Johnny Owen, boxer (born 1956)
- 22 November - Norah McGuinness, painter and illustrator (born 1901)
- 26 November - Rachel Roberts, actress (suicide) (born 1927)
- 3 December - Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists (born 1896)
- 8 December - John Lennon, singer, songwriter, and guitarist (The Beatles) (murdered) (born 1940)
Read more about this topic: 1980 In The United Kingdom
Famous quotes containing the word deaths:
“On almost the incendiary eve
Of deaths and entrances ...”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)
“There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the soldier’s sense of shame for having fought in actions that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel personally morally responsible for the war, and you get your proverbial walking time bomb.”
—Philip Caputo (b. 1941)