Milestones

By Melissa August, Amanda Bower, Christina Lewis, Victoria Rainert, Sylvia Wong Shih Chin, Sora Song, Heather Won Tesoriero, Josh Tyrangiel

DIED. MAUREEN REAGAN, 60, strong-willed, outspoken daughter of Ronald Reagan and actress Jane Wyman; of melanoma; in Granite Bay, Calif. Maureen avowed that she "was a Republican before the President was," though her views often--and publicly--clashed with his. Just like Dad, Maureen tried her hand early on at TV and film (bit parts on The Partridge Family and in the Elvis Presley film Kissin' Cousins), then at politics (unsuccessful bids for Senate and House seats in California in 1982 and 1992) and at writing (a memoir, First Father, First Daughter, published in 1989). In 1981, she married her third husband Dennis Revell, a Sacramento lobbyist, and in 1994, adopted a daughter Rita, now 16, Ugandan by birth. In the 1990s, after her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and despite her own cancer, she began a relentless campaign to raise awareness and money for Alzheimer's research. Devoted to her father, she lived, she said, for his good days. "There's nothing nicer than the sound of his laughter."

DIED. CHRISTOPHER HEWETT, 79, British-born stage actor who played the quick-witted and sarcastic title character in television's Mr. Belvedere, a onetime butler for English royalty who became housekeeper and mentor to a feeble-minded American family for five long years; in Los Angeles.

DIED. DUONG VAN MINH, 86, Vietnamese general known as "Big Minh," who organized the 1963 coup to overthrow South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem; in Pasadena, Calif. Big Minh (so called in part for his 6-ft., 200-lb. size), believed to have ordered Diem's assassination--with two raised fingers of his right hand--went on to become the last President of South Vietnam.

DIED. LARRY ADLER, 87, blacklisted musician who elevated the harmonica to concert-hall status; in London. When a local store owner gave the young Adler a harmonica, he taught himself to play by ear, won a harmonica-playing contest and left his home in Baltimore for New York City at 14. By the late 1930s he was performing in Carnegie Hall, still playing by ear; Ingrid Bergman, with whom he had an affair, was said to have persuaded him to pursue formal music training. In 1947, his liberal politics led to printed charges of communist sympathies; after suing unsuccessfully for libel, he emigrated to Britain in the early 1950s.

DIED. JORGE AMADO, 88, celebrated Brazilian writer whose 32 books were translated into some 50 languages; in Salvador, Brazil. His early novels, which often took swipes at Brazilian politicians, landed the author in prison and exile in the 1940s. Years later, his bawdier novels, Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon (1958) and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1966), were turned into movies.