A day after he opened a music festival named after him, Ebo Taylor died in hospital in Saltpond, a month after his 90th birthday. That was February 7, 2026, the same day the singer of 3 Doors Down died at 47, and the start of a month that also took Hollywood’s Tom Hagen and a civil rights leader who had been in Memphis when Martin Luther King was shot. These are ten of the best-known people who died in February 2026.
1. Chuck Negron (February 2, aged 83)
Chuck Negron was one of the three lead singers of Three Dog Night, the band that took “Joy to the World” and “One” to the top of the American charts. He sang lead on “One” and “Easy to Be Hard”. He later wrote frankly about the heroin addiction that nearly killed him in the 1980s, and he outlived it by almost forty years. Heart failure and lung disease caused his death.
2. John Virgo (February 4, aged 79)
For a generation of British television viewers, John Virgo was the man who did trick shots on Big Break, the BBC snooker game show he co-hosted with Jim Davidson from 1991 to 2002. Before that he won the UK Championship in 1979. He spent his later years in the BBC commentary box, where his voice became as familiar to snooker fans as the players he described. A ruptured aorta caused his death.
3. Sonny Jurgensen (February 6, aged 91)
Sonny Jurgensen was one of the best passers of the 1960s, first with the Philadelphia Eagles, where he won the NFL championship in 1960, and then for eleven seasons in Washington. He was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1983. Washington fans knew him for a second career too: he spent decades on the team’s radio broadcasts.
4. Ebo Taylor (February 7, aged 90)
Born in Cape Coast in 1936, Ebo Taylor played with Fela Kuti in London in the early 1960s, a meeting that fed into what became Afrobeat. His records were sampled by the Black Eyed Peas and Usher, and his albums Love and Death and Appia Kwa Bridge found him a new international audience when he was in his 70s. He had a stroke in 2018 and kept working; his last album came out in 2025. Ghana’s presidency called him one of the nation’s “greatest musicians ever”.
5. Brad Arnold (February 7, aged 47)
Brad Arnold wrote “Kryptonite” in a high school maths class, and in 2000 it made 3 Doors Down one of the biggest rock bands in America. He also co-wrote and sang “Here Without You”, the ballad that kept the band on the radio after “Kryptonite”. He died of renal cell carcinoma, a form of kidney cancer.
6. James Van Der Beek (February 11, aged 48)
James Van Der Beek was Dawson Leery, the film-obsessed teenager at the centre of Dawson’s Creek from 1998 to 2003. He followed it with Varsity Blues and, years later, a cheerful parody of himself in Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23. In November 2024 he revealed he had colorectal cancer and spent his last year urging men over 45 to get screened. He left his wife, Kimberly, and six children.
7. Robert Duvall (February 15, aged 95)
Robert Duvall’s first film role was Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird in 1962. A decade later he was Tom Hagen in The Godfather, and in Apocalypse Now he was Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore, the man who loved the smell of napalm in the morning. He won the Best Actor Oscar for Tender Mercies. His wife, Luciana, said he died peacefully at their home in Virginia. The family asked for no formal service.
8. Jesse Jackson (February 17, aged 84)
Jesse Jackson was with Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in April 1968. He went on to found Operation PUSH, run twice for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988, and negotiate the release of hostages abroad. He had lived for more than a decade with progressive supranuclear palsy. His family said he died surrounded by them.
9. Eric Dane (February 19, aged 53)
Eric Dane played Dr Mark Sloan, the plastic surgeon called “McSteamy”, on Grey’s Anatomy, and later the troubled father Cal Jacobs in Euphoria. He announced in April 2025 that he had ALS and became an advocate for research into the disease. He died less than a year later, leaving his wife, Rebecca Gayheart, and two daughters.
10. Robert Carradine (aged 71, announced February 24)
Robert Carradine was Lewis Skolnick in Revenge of the Nerds and, twenty years later, Sam McGuire, the father in Lizzie McGuire. His breakthrough came in 1972 in The Cowboys alongside John Wayne. His family said he had lived with bipolar disorder for two decades and died by suicide, and that they hoped speaking openly would reduce the stigma around mental illness.
Ebo Taylor’s last public act was opening his own festival, which means he died having seen the country celebrate his music in his name.