Born. To Wendy Hiller, 31, British stage & screen star (Love on the Dole, Pygmalion); and British Playwright Ronald Gow, 46, who co-authored Love on the Dole: a second daughter, third child; in London.

Born. To Jan Kiepura, 42, and Marta Eggerth, 29, cinema and stage singers lately costarred in the Manhattan revival of The Merry Widow: a first child, Jan Tadeusz (named in honor of Tadeusz Kosciuszko, Polish general of American Revolutionary War fame).

Died. "Jacques Mederic," French underground leader accredited by the Algiers Assembly (on which he served until recently) as the movement's No. 1 Nazi-killer; when he was captured by the Nazis in France; by his own hand (poison), lest he be tortured into talking.

Died. Harold Bell Wright, 72, master of the simple, sentimental, best-selling novel; in La Jolla, Calif. Farm hand, hobo, artist, house painter, lastly preacher, Wright began his writing career in 1899 after a rival clergyman convinced him that his sermons should be published, shortly turned his talents to sugaring the moralistic pill with mystery, intrigue, romance. For 21 novels (15 movies), his manly men and womanly women fought cleanly, loved truly against a backdrop of raptly described scenic grandeur. The two most famed novels: The Shepherd of the Hills (1907), 1,250,000 copies; The Winning of Barbara Worth (1911), 1,000,000. Always nervous about spelling and sentence structure, Harold Bell Wright had no literary pretensions, once said: "I know that I am not so skilled in the art of writing. . . ."

Died. W. Denham Verschoyle, 75, anti-Newtonian inventor who spent most of his life trying to make an apple fall up; near London.

Died. Keene Fitzpatrick, 79, famed Princeton track coach (1910-32); after a long illness; in Princeton, N.J. When he was just beginning his coaching career, at Yale, he gave later-famed coach Amos Alonzo Stagg a primer course in the art of the fast breakaway; later, at Michigan, he coached Christian Gauss, who became Princeton's dean.

Died. John Harper Narbeth, 80, whose design for H.M.S. Dreadnought in 1906 revolutionized battleship building; in Gloucester, England.

Reburied. Will Rogers, cowboy humorist-philosopher who was killed in 1935 in an Alaska plane crash; in a white stone crypt on a hillside near his home town, Claremore, Okla.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.