Transition: Final Bows; This was the year we said goodbye to a great American singer, a pair of groundbreaking photographers, the queen of cuisine and the captain of the marsupials, to a guy who got no respect, and a guy who got plenty: the 40th president of the United States.

Publication: Newsweek

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Ronald Reagan, 93

His life story reads--of course--like a movie script. A young man called "Dutch" goes from small-town Illinois to Hollywood, then forsakes stardom for politics. His folksy style and conservative views win him two terms as California's governor, then two terms as president. The Soviet Union crumbles; at home he prunes government programs and cuts taxes to stimulate the economy and lower the deficit. Wounded by a would-be assassin, he delivers the perfect line: "Honey, I forgot to duck." Reagan's second term was mired in controversy: the deficit soared; subordinates illegally sold weapons to Iran, funneling profits to Nicaragua's contras. Yet Reagan remained beloved; his death, after a decade during which he faded into Alzheimer's, released a long-deferred outpouring of grief.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, 95

Art photography, portraiture, photojournalism: there was nothing Cartier-Bresson could not do with a camera, and practically no subsequent photographer whose work he didn't influence. He was trained as a painter, fought for the French Resistance in World War II, then founded the cooperative Magnum, for which he photographed the rise of communist China and the fall of British India. (He took Gandhi's portrait an hour before his assassination.) Cartier-Bresson had the discerning eye and the lightning reflexes to capture over and over what he called "the decisive moment," when reality and design, content and form, intersect to make a work of art on film.

Ray Charles, 73

Which popular singer ever had a stronger combination of sheer chops and emotional intensity? Ray Charles was a popular mainstream entertainer, yet also a radically original, baffling, even disruptive force in American music. He grew up in Florida, was blind by the age of 7 and orphaned at 15. He began as an imitator of Nat King...

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