Milestones

DIED. Alvin Childress, 78, who became one of TV's first black stars when he played the philosophical cabby Amos in the 1951-53 video version of Amos and Andy, the 1929-54 radio institution; of pneumonia and other ailments; in Inglewood, Calif. The show succumbed to complaints that its good-natured parody perpetuated racial stereotypes, but it remained popular into the 1960s in syndication.

DIED. Mircea Eliade, 79, Rumanian-born historian of religions, authority on spiritual myths and symbols and longtime (1957-85) professor at the University of Chicago, whose works of encyclopedic research and interpretation, including The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949), The Sacred and the Profane (1959) and his definitive three-volume A History of Religious Ideas (1979-85), introduced to the West an appreciation of Eastern religions and of the parallels of thought and practice in vastly different cultures; in Chicago.

DIED. Otto Ludwig Preminger, 80, tyrannical Austrian-born producer and director who derived his greatest cinematic satisfactions--and some of his biggest successes--by flouting film-industry conventions, taboos and the studio system with such films as The Moon Is Blue (1953), which treated seduction wittily and used then banned words like virgin; The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), which graphically depicted drug addiction; Anatomy of a Murder (1959), with its detailed courtroom discus sion of a rape; and Exodus (1960), for which he defied McCarthyist blacklisting by hiring Scenarist Dalton Trumbo; of cancer; in New York City. A successful producer-director in Vienna before coming to the U.S. in 1936, he worked on Broadway and in Hollywood, where his first triumph was the masterly thriller Laura (1944). He also acted on stage and in films, often as a menacing Nazi, a role many of those who had wilted under the "Otto-crat's" frequent tongue lashings regarded as entirely appropriate.

DIED. Harold Arlen, 81, popular composer with a distinctively bluesy, jazz-based style who created some of America's most durable and cherished songs, ranging from the bubbling Get Happy, his first hit, in 1929, to the sultry Stormy Weather (1933) and including such perennials as It's Only a Paper Moon, Last Night When We Were Young, Come Rain or Come Shine, The Man That Got Away and, perhaps most memorably, Over the Rainbow, the Academy Award-winning ballad that Judy Garland sang in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz; in New York City. Born Chaim Arluk, the son of a Buffalo cantor, he started out as a pianist and band vocalist and began writing tunes for revues and nightclubs like Harlem's Cotton Club, including I Love a Parade, I've Got the World on a String and III Wind. A retiring man who liked to jot down musical ideas while walking the dog or riding in a car, he worked with such leading lyricists as Ted Koehler, Johnny Mercer, E.Y. Harburg and Ira Gershwin. Many of his hits, such as Let 's Fall in Love, Blues in the Night, That Old Black Magic and One for My Baby (And One More for the Road), survived forgettable Broadway and Hollywood musicals to become repertoire standards for gifted interpreters like Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand.