Milestones: Apr. 1, 1985

DIED. Michael Redgrave, 77, regal British stage and screen actor, one of the most versatile performers in the great British generation that includes Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud and patriarch of an acting dynasty that numbers his wife Rachel Kempson, daughters Vanessa and Lynn and son Corin; of Parkinson's disease; in Denham, England. Tall and handsome, a superb, cerebral technician with a richly expressive voice, he was less likely to play romantic leads than cool intellectuals or forbidding colonels whose aloof or aristocratic facades fail to conceal the emotions within. On the London stage, he mastered some of the great Shakespearean roles and gave definitive performances in plays by Chekhov and Ibsen. His screen credits include Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938), Dead of Night (1945) and The Browning Version (1951). Knighted in 1959, Redgrave struggled to keep working and in 1979 made his last major appearance when, already nearly disabled, he played a wheelchair-bound stroke victim.