HOSPITALIZED. Jon-Erik Hexum, 26, hunky TV actor; after he accidentally shot himself in the temple with a blank from a prop pistol during filming of his new series Cover Up; in Los Angeles.

DIED. Linwood Briley, 30, convicted murderer condemned for killing a disc jockey in Richmond, and implicated in ten other vicious Richmond-area gang killings in 1979; by electrocution; in Richmond. Last May Briley masterminded the largest death-row breakout in history when, with his brother James, 28, and four other convicted murderers, he dressed as a guard and drove an official van out of the maximum-security prison in Mecklenburg, Va., and was not captured until 19 days later in Philadelphia.

DIED. Frederick Brisson, 71, theatrical and film producer who oversaw some 20 Broadway shows, including the Tony Award-winning The Pajama Game (1954) and Damn Yankees (1955), then turned many of them into successful movies, and who was also responsible for the first appearances on Broadway of Play wrights Peter Shaffer (Five Finger Exercise, 1959) and Harold Pinter (The Caretaker, 1961); of a stroke; in New York City. Brisson was married for 35 years to Actress Rosalind Russell, until her death in 1976.

DIED. Lew Christensen, 75, pioneer American ballet dancer, choreographer and teacher who had been director or co-director of the San Francisco Ballet since 1952; of a heart attack; in Burlingame, Calif. He started his career in the 1930s as America's first major male star, dancing for George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein in a precursor of today's New York City Ballet. Creator of such popular, diverse works as Filling Station and Con Amore, Christensen, with his dancing brothers Harold and Willam, helped to build the quality of ballet in the western U.S.

DIED. Victor Jules ("Trader Vic") Bergeron, 81, irascible, ingenious restaurateur who, starting in 1934, parlayed a tiny beer parlor in Oakland, Calif., into a San Francisco-based food and drink corporation grossing $50 million a year and featuring an international chain of 21 restaurants proffering an eclectic South Seas decor, rum drinks garnished with flowers and fruit and an "exotic" cuisine carefully tailored to American middle-brow taste; of a stroke; in Hillsborough, Calif. "You can't eat real Polynesian food," he once protested, calling it "horrible junk." Having lost a leg at age six to tuberculosis (and not, as legend would have it, to a South Pacific shark), he considered himself "not handicapped, merely inconvenienced," and worked tirelessly for 40 years to spread that message to U.S. amputee veterans.