Seeking Divorce. Jill Townsend, 31, American actress; from Nicol Williamson, 38, crown prince of the British stage, whom she met in 1965 when she played his daughter in Inadmissible Evidence on Broadway; after five years of marriage; one son; in London.

Died. William Redfield, 49, veteran TV, stage and screen actor whose estimated 2,000 performances included playing Harding in the Academy Award-winning film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; of a respiratory ailment complicated by leukemia; in Manhattan. The son of a music arranger and a Ziegfeld Follies chorus girl, Redfield played ten roles on Broadway before he was 20. He later wrote about the theater --Letters From an Actor (1967)--and with Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan helped found the Actors Studio.

Died. William D. Geer, 70, who came to Time Inc. from Yale in 1929, and in the course of his long and varied career was editor of The March of Time, general manager of FORTUNE, and from 1943 to 1949, its publisher; of a stroke; in Gilsum, N.H.

Died. Alastair Sim, 75, doleful-vis-aged British actor of stage and screen; of cancer; in London. During a marvelous 50 years of playing bedeviled headmasters, bungling sleuths and dotty bishops (he officiated at Peter O'Toole's wedding in The Ruling Class), Sim deftly dodged interviews. But he once let it be known that it was revealed to him "many years ago with conclusive certainty that I was a fool and that I had always been a fool. Since then I have been as happy as any man has a right to be."

Died. Dr. Willard Cole Rappleye, 84, dean of Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons (1931-51), who helped the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center to develop into one of the nation's great hospitals; in Manhattan. Rappleye got his M.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Medical School in 1918, worked in various hospitals in California and the Northeast, and taught hospital administration. Named dean of the medical faculty at Columbia at 39, he was a forward-looking educator who adapted the medical curriculum to keep pace with medical progress. In 1961, concerned with the disintegration of services in New York City's municipal hospitals, he arranged for the hospitals to become affiliated with the city's medical colleges. He insisted that medicine should be "a social as well as a biological science" and preferred a medical student with "a rounded capacity for life" to "one whose only view of humanity was gained as he passed from one laboratory to another."

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