By Guy D.Garcia

True, the carefully manicured haircut has gone from black to white, and the jaunty gait has lost some of its bounce, but the chiseled good looks and the smooth-as-silk charm are as timeless as a well-tailored tuxedo. His last movie, Walk, Don't Run, was released in 1966, but Cary Grant, who turned 80 last week, has never lost his Hollywood gloss--or his penchant for privacy. In an effort to keep his birthday "as low key as possible," the actor, born in England as Archie Leach, celebrated by staying home with his wife Barbara, 33, while calls and presents poured in from well-wishers.

Old Friend Rex Harrison, 75, sent his love but reportedly could not resist adding, "How do you look like you do at 80?

It's disgraceful." How does Grant explain his enduring appeal? "I'd like to think that I don't look my age, but I know I do," he says. "I may look good for my age, but that's something else."

"I was looking around for antidotes to my pain, which was partly the result of never having been alone before." Thus it was in 1973, after divorcing her second husband, that Deirdre Blomfield-Brown decided to change her name and her life by beginning a novitiate in the 2,500-year-old tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Today Ane Pema Cho-dron, 47, whose name means "lotus dharma torch," is executive director of a meditation center in Boulder, Colo., and probably the only American woman to have been fully ordained as a Buddhist nun. The mother of two children and a former elementary school teacher in California and New Mexico, Chodron followed the path of enlightenment to Hong Kong. There she made more than 300 vows, including celibacy, abstinence from alcohol and never to handle money, travel alone or ride in a vehicle. Even so, next month she will fly to New York City to lead a seminar on Buddhist meditation and raise money for a Buddhist monastery in Nova Scotia. Abiding by Buddha's rules is not always possible in the modern world, admits Chodron. "It is often necessary to live by the spirit of the vows."

In the sunny days before her free concert in New York City's Central Park last July, Singer Diana Ross, 39, made a generous offer: the proceeds from the TV taping of the show would be used to build a children's playground named after the erstwhile Supreme. But when the event's promoters announced that a thunderstorm had washed away the profits, there were rumblings from Mayor Edward Koch's office suggesting that it was not just Ross who had been soaked. The dark cloud hanging over the affair turned out to have a silver lining last week when Ross presented Koch with a $250,000 check from her own pocket. "It's for the kids," said the singer, who donned an orange city-department-of-parks slicker to show that there were no hard feelings. Said Parks Commissioner Henry Stern: "For $250,000 you can get a small but exquisite playground." There was a time when it would buy a whole park.

As the gutsy, globetrotting Marion in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Karen Allen, 32, established herself as a heroine with a flair for exotic adventure. But in Until September, which has just finished filming in Paris, the Illinois-born actress finds some risky business in a setting that is more mundane, if no less romantic. This time Allen plays a horticulturist from St. Louis who takes a summer vacation in France and falls in love with a handsome French banker, played by Gallic Heartthrob Thierry Lhermitte, 30. The summer sweethearts make love in a bank vault and a bathtub, among other places. Allen says she speaks "bad French" but seems to have had no problem making herself understood. Looks like this is one time Indiana Jones didn't come to the rescue. --By Guy D.Garcia