On Easter Sunday 2025, Pope Francis appeared on the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica, too weak to read his own blessing, and was driven through the crowd in the square below. He died the next morning. It was the last public act of a pontificate that had begun in 2013, and it came in a month that also took Hollywood’s Iceman and one of Latin America’s greatest writers.
1. Val Kilmer (April 1, aged 65)
Val Kilmer was Iceman in Top Gun, Jim Morrison in The Doors, Doc Holliday in Tombstone and Batman in Batman Forever. Throat cancer took most of his voice in the 2010s, and in Top Gun: Maverick in 2022 his character spoke through a computer. His daughter said he died of pneumonia.
2. Clem Burke (April 6, aged 70)
Clem Burke was Blondie’s drummer from 1975, playing on “Heart of Glass”, “Call Me” and “Atomic”, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the band in 2006. He had kept his cancer private.
3. Nicky Katt (April 8, aged 54)
Nicky Katt was the bully Clint in Dazed and Confused and the teacher Harry Senate in Boston Public, two roles that made him one of the most recognisable character actors of the 1990s and 2000s.
4. Mario Vargas Llosa (April 13, aged 89)
The Peruvian novelist wrote The Time of the Hero, Conversation in the Cathedral and The Feast of the Goat, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010 and ran for president of Peru in 1990. In 1976 he punched Gabriel García Márquez in a Mexico City cinema, and neither man ever explained why. His family announced his death in Lima.
5. Wink Martindale (April 15, aged 91)
Wink Martindale hosted Tic-Tac-Dough and a string of other American game shows, and as a young radio DJ in Memphis he was one of the first to interview Elvis Presley on air.
6. Pope Francis (April 21, aged 88)
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Jesuit Archbishop of Buenos Aires, became the first pope from the Americas and the first named Francis in 2013. He lived in a Vatican guesthouse instead of the papal apartments and spent much of his papacy arguing with conservatives in his own church. He had spent five weeks in hospital with double pneumonia earlier in the year. The Vatican said he died of a stroke and heart failure on Easter Monday.
7. Jay North (aged 73)
Jay North was the child star of Dennis the Menace on American television from 1959 to 1963 and later spoke about the harm early fame had done him. He died of colon cancer.
8. Jean Marsh (aged 90)
Jean Marsh co-created Upstairs, Downstairs with Eileen Atkins and won an Emmy for playing Rose, the head housemaid. She also starred in Willow. She died of complications from dementia.
9. Lee Montague (aged 97)
The BAFTA-winning British character actor worked on British stage and screen for decades, with roles in Bergerac and many other series.
10. Priscilla Pointer (aged 100)
Priscilla Pointer played Rebecca Wentworth in Dallas and, in Carrie, the mother of Sue Snell, who was played by her real daughter, Amy Irving. She reached 100 before she died.
Francis chose his name after Francis of Assisi, and was buried, at his own request, not in St Peter’s but in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, the first pope buried outside the Vatican in more than a century.