Milestones Dec. 4, 1995

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ENGAGED. HEATHER WHITESTONE, 22, retired Miss America; to JOHN MCCALLUM, 25, aide to House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

DIED. JUNIOR WALKER, 53, saxophonist; of cancer; in Battle Creek, Michigan. As the front man for the Motown hitmakers, Junior Walker and the All Stars, Walker wielded a saxophone drenched in the blues. His high-wire riffs propelled such sixties standards as How Sweet It Is (to be Loved By You), Come See About Me, and These Eyes.

DIED. LOUIS MALLE, 63, French film director; of complications from lymphoma; in Beverly Hills. Working on both sides of the Atlantic, Malle unflinchingly explored topics like incest (1971's Le Souffle au Coeur), France's collaboration with its Nazi occupiers (Lacombe, Lucien, 1974) and child prostitution (1978's Pretty Baby, his first American film, which also launched Brooke Shields). Yet Malle's high-voltage subject matter contrasted with an often reflective style that reached its apex in his second American film Atlantic City (1981), which starred Burt Lancaster as an aging hood playing out the role of dashing outlaw that had eluded him in his youth. His oddest film was 1981's My Dinner with Andre, a 110-minute conversation in which two friends wrestle with transcendent issues and nouvelle cuisine. But Malle called Au Revoir les Enfants (1987)--a memoir of his days at a Catholic school that concealed Jewish children from the Nazis--"the one film I would like to be remembered for."

DIED. CHARLES GORDONE, 70, playwright; of cancer; in College Station, Texas. Gordone became the first African-American playwright to win the Pulitzer Prize with the 1969 Broadway bow of No Place to Be Somebody. A portrait of schemers, dreamers and losers in a grungy Greenwich Village bar, it owed as much to the saloon drama of O'Neill and Saroyan as it did to the black theater renaissance of the sixties.