Deaths
- January 1 – Ray Walston, 86, actor (My Favorite Martian )
- January 18 – Al Waxman, 65, actor (Lt. Samuels on Cagney & Lacey)
- February 20 – Bob Weiskopf, 86, writer (I Love Lucy)
- February 27 – Stan Margulies, 80, producer (Roots, The Thorn Birds)
- March 8 – Edward Winter, 63, actor
- March 12 – Morton Downey, Jr., 67, television personality
- March 15 – Ann Sothern, 92, actress (Private Secretary, My Mother the Car)
- March 21 – Norma MacMillan, 79, voice actor
- March 22 – William Hanna, 90, cofounder (with Joseph Barbera) of famous Hanna-Barbera animation studio
- April 11 – George Hersee, 76, BBC engineer who designed Test Card F
- April 15 – Joey Ramone, 49, actor/songwriter of the Ramones
- May 2 – Ted Rogers, 65, Comedian and host of 3-2-1
- May 12 – Perry Como, 88, singer, TV host
- May 19 – Pat Falken Smith, 75, soap opera writer
- May 22 – Whitman Mayo, 70, actor (Grady Wilson on Sanford and Son)
- May 23 - Harry Townes, 86, actor The Fugitive
- May 31 – Arlene Francis, 93, actress and game show panelist (What's My Line?)
- June 2 – Imogene Coca, 92, actress and comedienne (Your Show of Shows)
- June 21 – Carroll O'Connor, 76, actor who played Archie Bunker on All in the Family
- August 3 – Christopher Hewett, 79, actor (Mr. Belvedere)
- August 4 – Lorenzo Music, 64, writer and actor who co-created The Bob Newhart Show and did the voices of Carlton the doorman on Rhoda and Garfield the cat in the animated version of Jim Davis comic character
- August 25 – Aaliyah, 22, singer
- September 3 - Thuy Trang, 27, actress (Mighty Morphin Power Rangers)
- September 11 – David Angell, 55, writer (Cheers, Frasier), killed in the World Trade Center attacks
- October 9 – Dagmar, 79, 1950s television sex symbol
- October 15 – Ralph Levy, 81, director
- October 17 – Jay Livingston, 86, songwriter (themes to Bonanza and Mister Ed)
- November 29- George Harrison 58 songwriter The Beatles guest on the The Ed Sullivan Show
- December 22 – Lance Loud, 50, member of the family documented in An American Family
- December 26 - Nigel Hawthorne, 72, actor (Yes, Prime Minister)
Read more about this topic: 2001 In American Television
Famous quotes containing the word deaths:
“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)
“I sang of death but had I known
The many deaths one must have died
Before he came to meet his own!”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“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)