Born. To actress Britt Ekland, 30, former wife of Comedian Peter Sellers, and her companion for the past two years, Lou Adler, 38, millionaire record producer who rode to success on a wave of surfing music in the '60s: their first child, her second, a son; in London. Name: Nicholai Ekland Adler.

Engaged. Avery Brundage, 85, former president of the International Olympic Committee (1952-72) and longtime curmudgeonly opponent of commercialism in amateur sports; and Mariann Princess Reuss, 37, descendant of German royalty and a hostess at last summer's Munich Olympics. Said Brundage, a widower for nearly two years: "The princess is very mature for her age. People say I am young."

Died. William Inge, 60, playwright and scenarist; by his own hand (of carbon-monoxide poisoning); in Hollywood Hills, Calif. In 1945 a Chicago production of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie inspired Inge, then a St. Louis drama critic, to give up reviewing plays and start writing them.

From the slovenly housewife and third-rate chiropractor in his first Broadway hit, Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), to the commonplace women of the Pulitzer prizewinning Picnic (1953), to the wistful nightclub singer and the cowboy of Bus Stop (1955), to the ordinary family life in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957), Inge drew on his own Kansas boyhood for "some very sustaining memories of people in their sad, funny, futile, courageous and frightened ways of meeting life and trying to cope with it." When his engaging but minor talent began to fail, he turned to Hollywood, where his screenplay for Splendor in the Grass (1961) won an Oscar. Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff (1970), a novel about a woman brutally isolated from society, met with modest success. The manuscript of an other Inge novel, The Boy From the Circus, was found in his living room on the day of his death -- rejected by a New York publisher.

Died. Fritz Erich von Lewinski von Manstein, 85, the armored-warfare strategist who masterminded Germany's blitzkrieg against France in 1940; of a heart attack; in Irschenhausen, West Germany. Von Manstein was named a field marshal by Hitler in 1942 for his victories in the Crimean campaign against the Soviets and dismissed two years later for advocating a strategy of retreat from Stalingrad. Tried by the British, he was imprisoned for war crimes. Upon his release, he became a consultant to the West German government, advocating a citizens' army with universal conscription for his country in the postwar era.

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