Chris Rea’s “Driving Home for Christmas” climbs the British charts every December, and in December 2025 it was played on the radio in the same week its singer died. It was a month that had already taken the architect Frank Gehry and the director Rob Reiner, and it ended with the death of Brigitte Bardot. These are eight of the best-known people who died in December 2025.
1. Frank Gehry (December 5, aged 96)
Frank Gehry designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, whose titanium curves turned a struggling Basque port into a tourist destination, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. He won the Pritzker Prize in 1989.
2. Sophie Kinsella (December 10, aged 55)
Madeleine Wickham, writing as Sophie Kinsella, created the Shopaholic novels, which sold tens of millions of copies and became a Hollywood film in 2009. She had revealed in 2024 that she had glioblastoma.
3. Rob Reiner (December 14, aged 78)
Rob Reiner played Meathead in All in the Family and then directed This Is Spinal Tap, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally and A Few Good Men in a row of hits that few directors have matched. He and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were found dead at their home in Los Angeles, and police treated their deaths as a homicide.
4. Joe Ely (December 15, aged 78)
The Texas singer-songwriter co-founded the Flatlanders and toured with the Clash, who were fans of his records, in 1980.
5. James Ransone (December 19, aged 46)
James Ransone played Ziggy Sobotka in the second season of The Wire and the adult Eddie Kaspbrak in It Chapter Two.
6. Chris Rea (December 22, aged 74)
Chris Rea sold more than thirty million albums with records like The Road to Hell and On the Beach, and wrote “Driving Home for Christmas” while stuck in traffic in the 1970s. He had survived pancreatic cancer and a stroke.
7. Brigitte Bardot (December 28, aged 91)
Brigitte Bardot became an international star with And God Created Woman in 1956 and was the face of French cinema for the next fifteen years. She retired from films in 1973, aged 39, and gave the rest of her life to animal rights through her foundation. In later years she was convicted several times in France of inciting racial hatred. Her foundation announced her death.
8. Isiah Whitlock Jr. (December 30, aged 71)
Isiah Whitlock Jr. played the corrupt state senator Clay Davis in The Wire, whose drawn-out “sheeeeit” became a catchphrase, and later appeared in Veep and Spike Lee’s films.
The Wire lost two of its actors in the last fortnight of the year: Ransone, who played the dockworker’s son in its second season, and Whitlock, its most quoted politician.