2025 was a year of major losses across global entertainment, as cinema, television, and music said goodbye to influential voices from every corner of the industry. From visionary filmmakers and beloved actors to genre-defining singers and behind-the-scenes hitmakers, these deaths marked the end of eras and sparked renewed appreciation for the work they left behind.
David Lynch (filmmaker, writer, artist) - Died in January 2025. Lynch reshaped modern screen language with dream-logic storytelling, unsettling sound design, and deadpan humor. He made films like Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive and co-created Twin Peaks, which permanently rewired TV ambition. He also worked across music, painting, and writing.
Gene Hackman (actor) - Died in February 2025. Hackman was a two-time Oscar winner known for intense, unpredictable performances that made even quiet scenes feel dangerous. From The French Connection to Unforgiven, he specialized in authority figures with cracks in the armor. Reports said he died of heart disease; officials discussed circumstances around him and his wife.
Val Kilmer (actor) - Died in April 2025. Kilmer’s career swung between blockbuster swagger and strange, committed character work: Top Gun, The Doors, Tombstone, and Batman Forever. Reuters reported pneumonia as the cause, following years of serious health struggles. He left behind one of Hollywood’s most distinctive, mercurial screen presences of his era.
Roberta Flack (singer, pianist) - Died February 24, 2025. Flack blended soul, jazz, pop, and R&B with a restrained emotional precision that made her ballads feel like close conversation. Reuters reported her death at 88, noting her boundary-crossing influence and the way her voice reshaped mainstream adult contemporary and soul for decades.
Michelle Trachtenberg (actor) - Died in February 2025. Trachtenberg grew up onscreen and became a pop-culture fixture through Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Gossip Girl, balancing vulnerability with sharp edges. Reuters reported she died at 39. Tributes emphasized her impact on millennial TV and her ability to steal scenes with timing and intensity.
Angie Stone (singer, songwriter) - Died in March 2025. Stone moved from pioneering early female hip-hop (The Sequence) into neo-soul and R&B stardom, with hits that carried both grit and tenderness. Reuters reported she died at 63 in a car accident after a performance, and highlighted her genre-spanning career and Grammy nominations.
Brian Wilson (musician, Beach Boys cofounder) - Died in June 2025. Wilson was a songwriting and production architect who turned harmony, studio experimentation, and emotional honesty into pop’s new toolkit. Reuters reported his death at 82 and noted his role behind classics like Good Vibrations and God Only Knows, plus the lasting influence of Pet Sounds across generations.
Ozzy Osbourne (singer, Black Sabbath frontman) - Died in July 2025. Osbourne helped invent heavy metal’s sound and mythology, then improbably became mainstream reality-TV family chaos in later life. Reuters reported his death at 76 and revisited the full arc: Black Sabbath, solo reinvention, scandals, and a long public battle with serious health issues.
Terence Stamp (actor) - Died in August 2025. Stamp could be magnetic, chilly, and oddly tender, often in the same scene. Reuters reported his death at 87, noting his long career across British cinema and Hollywood, including his iconic villain turn as General Zod in the Superman films, plus decades of stage and screen work.
Graham Greene (actor) - Died in September 2025. Greene was one of the most recognizable Indigenous actors in North American film, celebrated for intelligence and warmth onscreen. Reuters reported his death at 73 and highlighted his Oscar-nominated work in Dances With Wolves along with a vast filmography spanning prestige dramas and mainstream hits.
Diane Keaton (actor) - Died in October 2025. Keaton’s comedic rhythm and emotional transparency made her a defining modern screen presence, from Annie Hall onward. Reuters reported her death at 79. She built an unusually durable career balancing quirk, vulnerability, and sharp intelligence, becoming an icon across multiple generations of audiences.
D’Angelo (singer, producer, multi-instrumentalist) - Died in October 2025. D’Angelo was a core architect of neo-soul, fusing funk, gospel, hip-hop, and deep R&B into a style that countless artists borrowed from. The Guardian reported his death at 51 from pancreatic cancer, noting the influence of Brown Sugar and the artistic weight of Black Messiah.
Robert Redford (actor, director) - Died in October 2025. Redford was both old-school star power and a behind-the-scenes institution builder. Reuters reported his death at 89, revisiting his acting legacy (Butch Cassidy, The Sting) and his directorial success (Ordinary People), plus the Sundance impact that changed independent cinema’s ecosystem.
Dharmendra (actor) - Died in November 2025. Reuters reported Dharmendra’s death at 89 after illness, describing him as one of Hindi cinema’s defining leading men across action, romance, and comedy. With hundreds of films and decades of cultural imprint, he remained an enduring reference point for what “movie-star charisma” meant in Bollywood.
Jimmy Cliff (singer, actor) - Died in November 2025. Cliff helped carry Jamaican music to global audiences and remained a symbol of reggae’s storytelling power. The Guardian reported his death at 81, emphasizing his role in popularizing reggae internationally and his place in the lineage of artists who made the genre feel like a world language, not just a local sound.
Steve Cropper (guitarist, songwriter, producer) - Died in December 2025. Cropper’s guitar work and songwriting shaped the sound of Stax and Memphis soul, leaving fingerprints on classics like Green Onions and (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay. The Guardian reported his death at 84 and framed him as an architect of American groove and restraint.
Joe Ely (singer-songwriter) - Died in December 2025. Ely was a Texas-rooted, genre-hopping songwriter who connected honky-tonk, rock, and punk energy, collaborating with artists from Bruce Springsteen to The Clash. AP reported he died at 78 with complications including Lewy body dementia and Parkinson’s disease, and highlighted his cult-hero status among musicians.
Gil Gerard (actor) - Died in December 2025. Gerard became a sci-fi TV icon as Buck Rogers, turning a comic-book premise into charismatic, weekly escapism. Entertainment Weekly reported he died at 82 after a rare aggressive cancer and noted his broader TV career across popular American series. His appeal was always “charming confidence with a wink.”
Humphrey Burton (arts broadcaster, filmmaker) - Died in December 2025. Burton was a key figure in how television treated classical music as something vivid and watchable, not museum material. The Guardian reported his death at 94 and credited him with major BBC arts initiatives, landmark documentaries, and decades of shaping public understanding of musicians like Bernstein and Menuhin.
Anthony Geary (actor) - Died in December 2025. Geary became a daytime-TV phenomenon as Luke Spencer on General Hospital, a role that turned soap opera fame into full cultural weather, including the legendary Luke and Laura era. The Washington Post reported he died at 78 in Amsterdam due to surgical complications, noting his eight Daytime Emmys and complicated legacy.
Carl Carlton (singer) - Died in December 2025. Carlton delivered durable hits that keep resurfacing across decades: Everlasting Love and She’s a Bad Mama Jama. The Los Angeles Times reported his death, tracing his Detroit origins and his ability to sit right on the seam between soul sweetness and funk punch. His voice was instantly recognizable when it mattered.
Ruth Buzzi (comedian, actor) - Died in May 2025. Buzzi was a sketch-comedy original, beloved for her Laugh-In character Gladys Ormphby, the hairnet-and-handbag avatar of perfectly aimed grumpiness. Reuters reported she died at 88 from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. Her career spanned decades of TV, film, and voice work, always with sharp timing.
Jill Sobule (singer-songwriter) - Died in May 2025. Sobule made witty, fearless pop with teeth, best known for I Kissed a Girl (1995) and the Clueless-linked Supermodel. AP reported she died at 66 in a house fire in Minnesota. She also pioneered independent funding models long before it was fashionable, and she wrote songs that argued with the world (sweetly).
George Wendt (actor, comedian) - Died in May 2025. Wendt became universally recognizable as Norm on Cheers, the kind of character whose entrance alone got applause. Reuters reported he died at 76, peacefully in his sleep. He came out of Chicago’s comedy scene (Second City) and spent a lifetime as the reliable, funny human center of ensembles on TV and stage.
Loretta Swit (actor) - Died in May 2025. Swit’s Margaret Hot Lips Houlihan on MAS*H evolved from comic target to layered, resilient person, and she played that transformation with rare control. Reuters reported she died at 87. She also became known for animal-rights activism and for treating a long-running TV role as serious craft rather than comfort-food repetition.
Presley Chweneyagae (actor) - Died in May 2025. Chweneyagae broke through globally with Tsotsi, the Oscar-winning South African film that made his performance unforgettable. AP reported he died at 40 and emphasized both his screen work and his reputation in theatre. Tributes framed him as a generational talent whose range went beyond acting into writing and directing ambitions.
Robert Benton (director, screenwriter) - Died in May 2025. Benton helped define New Hollywood storytelling, co-writing Bonnie and Clyde and later winning Oscars for Kramer vs. Kramer and Places in the Heart. The Guardian reported his death at 92 and described him as a filmmaker who could do intimate human messiness without sentimentalizing it. His work made adult drama feel urgent, not “prestige duty.”
Johnny Rodriguez (country singer) -Died in May 2025. Rodriguez was a trailblazing Hispanic figure in country music, scoring major hits in the 1970s and opening doors in a genre that often gatekept identity and accent. Billboard reported his death at 73, with confirmation from his daughter. His voice carried classic country ache, but his career carried a bigger cultural story.
Irv Gotti (music executive, Murder Inc. founder)- Died in February 2025. Gotti shaped early-2000s hip-hop and R&B crossover by building Murder Inc. into a hit-making factory with artists like Ashanti and Ja Rule, while collaborating across the genre’s elite. AP reported his death at 54, revisiting both the chart domination and the controversies that followed. Whatever you think of the era, his fingerprints are everywhere.
Rob Reiner (director, producer) and Michele Singer Reiner (photographer) - Died in December 2025. Reuters reported filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife Michele were killed in their Los Angeles home, with their son facing murder charges. Reiner’s directing credits span modern classics like Stand By Me and A Few Good Men, and his cultural footprint includes both filmmaking and outspoken public life.
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