Milestones, Jan. 7, 1980

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DIED. Rudi Dutschke, 39, firebrand champion of West German student radicalism in the '60s, and better known as Red Rudi; on suffering a seizure and drowning in a bathtub; in Arhus, Denmark.

DIED. Joan Blondell, 73, brassy blond film star for five decades; of leukemia; in Santa Monica. The daughter of vaudevillians, Blondell went to Hollywood in 1930 and made 54 films in eight years, mainly playing gun molls and chorines. Later she perfected the role of the blowsy, wisecracking blond in The Cincinnati Kid, Grease and TV's Here Come the Brides. "It's fine to start out as a curvy biz-whiz," she said, "but it takes all the talent you've got in your guts to play unimportant roles."

DIED. Darryl Zanuck, 77, imperious production chief at 20th Century-Fox for 35 years and a thousand films; of pneumonia; in Palm Springs, Calif. The cigar-chomping, polo-playing mogul got his Hollywood break when Warner Bros, hired him as a $250-a-week scenarist for Rin Tin Tin. In four years he was head of production at 20 times that salary. Warner's Wunderkind brought dialogue to feature films (The Jazz Singer, 1927) and pioneered such realistic genres as the gangster and "working gal" films. In 1933 Zanuck and United Artists Head Joseph M. Schenck formed 20th Century Pictures, which soon merged with Fox Films. He produced such Oscar-winners as The Grapes of Wrath and All About Eve and copped three coveted Thalberg Awards. After converting the studio to the wide-screen Cinemascope, Zanuck left Fox in 1956 for a spree of mediocre film making. He returned as president in 1962 to reverse Fox's declining fortunes with such hits as Patton, M*A*S*H and The Sound of Music before reluctantly retiring in 1971.

DIED. Peggy Guggenheim, 81, American-born patroness of 20th century art; following a stroke; in Camposampiero, Italy. Seven years after losing her father on the Titanic in 1912, Peggy came into her share of the Guggenheim copper fortune and departed for the bohemia of Paris and London. She flamboyantly dallied with writers and artists: two became her husbands (including Painter Max Ernst), many her lovers (including Playwright Samuel Beckett). Bored and between husbands in 1938, she began to collect art, later and anonymously sponsor young artists, adopting the motto "Buy a painting a day." When the Louvre declared in 1940 that her Dalis, Mirds and Picassos were not worth the effort of hiding them from the Nazis, she shipped them to New York, opened the influential Art of This Century gallery and sponsored American painters like Jackson Pollock. But after five years in the country she considered "impersonal and [full of] unhappy people," she moved to Venice, ensconcing herself and her art in a palazzo-cum-museum.