Born. To Diana Ross, 27, singer and exemplar of the Motown Sound, and Robert Ellis Silberstein, 25, Los Angeles public relations executive: their first child, a daughter; in Hollywood. Name: Rhonda Suzanne.

Died. Peter Fleming, 64, peripatetic man of action and letters; of a heart attack; in Black Mount, Scotland. Though less famous as a writer than his older brother Ian, who created James Bond, Peter Fleming produced minor classics. His books Brazilian Adventure (1933) and News from Tartary (1936) are still in print. The first, which spoofed superserious adventure tales, was based on his search for a lost jungle expedition; the second on his 3,500-mile trek from China to Kashmir. A Grenadier Guards colonel during World War II, he was an intelligence operative in Nazi-occupied Greece, then in Asia, where he concocted a mythical set of war plans that misled the Japanese as to the real movements of British forces. Much of his later writing was on military history.

Died. Horace McMahon, 64, bullnecked, gravel-voiced character actor who was long one of Hollywood's favorite heavies; in Norwalk, Conn. After several years as a bit player and a starring role on Broadway, McMahon went West and was soon typecast as a mobster--a bread-and-butter persona that he relished in many of his 135 films. "I was a jailbird," he said, "behind bars so often that Western Costume Company had a 'Horace McMahon' tag sewn into a convict's striped suit." In 1949 he exchanged his prison number for a badge number, returning to the stage as Lieut. Monoghan in Detective Story. Finding his new image as the hard-boiled cop equally remunerative, McMahon later became the grumbling police lieutenant who ran New York's 65th precinct detective squad on the long-lived ABC series Naked City.

Died. Albrecht Goetze, 74, dean of Babylonian scholars; of a heart attack; in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. Branded "politically unreliable" by the Nazis, Goetze fled to the U.S. in 1934 and joined the faculty at Yale, where he served as Professor of Assyriology and Babylonian Literature for three decades. One of his biggest contributions to the understanding of the ancients started by chance in 1948: he stumbled across some neglected tablets in the Iraq Museum. Eventually he identified them as one of the world's oldest known body of laws--the Akkadian Code of Eshnunna. Goetze translated the code, which predates the 3,700-year-old Code of Hammurabi by more than 150 years. It showed that price controls were used in the ancient Babylonian kingdom and that criminal penalties were carefully spelled out: "If a man bites the nose of another man and severs it, he shall pay a fine of one pound of silver."

Died. Paul Lukas, 76, the durable actor with the Continental mien; of heart disease; in Tangier. "Acting is a Gesell-schaftspiel" declared Budapest-born Lukas. "When I speak lines in a play, I mean them; I am talking to someone. It's all real." Brought to America by Producer Adolph Zukor in 1927, Lukas first appeared on the Hollywood silent screen opposite Pola Negri in Loves of an Actress. He took a recess from films and in 1941 scored his greatest stage triumph portraying Kurt Mueller, the dogged anti-Nazi hero of Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine. Three years later he received an Oscar for best actor when he re-created the role on film.

Died. Spyros P. Skouras, 78, longtime cinema mogul; of a heart attack; in Rye, N.Y. A Greek immigrant 61 years ago, Skouras started his American career as a hotel busboy. He and two brothers bought into a nickelodeon in 1914, then built their $4,000 investment into a chain of moneymaking movie palaces. Skouras also took over the Fox Metropolitan theater group, rescued it from bankruptcy and wound up in 1942 as head of the entire 20th Century-Fox empire. He pioneered revolutionary techniques like CinemaScope and presided over the production of dozens of screen classics, including The Robe, The Snake Pit and Gentleman's Agreement. Blamed for massive losses incurred partly by the $30 million epic Cleopatra, he resigned as Fox president in 1962 and later took the helm of the Prudential-Grace shipping lines.

Died. Henry Fitz Gerald Heard, 81, novelist, philosopher and member of the fraternity of pacifist intellectuals that included Aldous Huxley and Bertrand Russell; in Santa Monica, Calif. Though he once declared that "words are at the end of their tether; their elasticity is worn out," the British expatriate was a most prolific writer. As H.F. Heard, he turned out first-rate detective stories (A Taste for Honey) and Orwellian chillers (The Great Fog). As Gerald Heard, he wrote such scholarly works on philosophy and religion as A Dialogue in the Desert and The Ascent of Humanity.

Died. Field Marshal Siegmund Wilhelm List, 91, the Nazi Blitzkriegmeister who for a time was one of Hitler's favorite field commanders; in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. The stony-faced strategist engineered the fall of Greece and Yugoslavia, earning the title "Balkan Conqueror." Though Hitler personally selected him in 1942 to take command of German forces in the Caucasus, List concluded that the Russian campaign was futile and was sacked. Given a life sentence as a war criminal, he was released after only four years in prison.

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