It was 30 years ago this week that federal health officials reported about a deadly illness that they called AIDS. Since then millions of people have died of it, including these celebrities. A leading actor in the romantic comedies of the 1950s and 1960s, Rock Hudson was among the first celebrities to die of AIDS. His death, just before his 40th birthday, led his friend Elizabeth Taylor to engage in raising funds for AIDS research for the rest of her life. Freddie Mercury, lead singer of the rock group Queen, was 45 when he died, just days after publicly acknowledging that had contracted AIDS. Sci- fi author Isaac Asimov contracted HIV from a blood transfusion during heart bypass surgery. The cause of his death, back in 1992, was listed as heart and kidney failure, but years later it has been revealed that both those causes were AIDS related. Former tennis player Arthur Ashe, where the main court in the US Open got its name from,  contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion. He spoke out on AIDS issues untill his death on February 6, 1993. He was 49. Anthony Perkins, who gave a career- defining performance as a lead actor in Hitchcock’s movie 'Psycho', died in his sixties from complications of AIDS. He was rumored to have had affairs with a number of Hollywood’s male stars. Actress Amanda Blake (pictured) was also 60 when she died, on August 16, 1989. Although she had throat cancer at the time of her death, it is widely believed that she had contracted the virus from her ex- husband and died of AIDS-related complications.