Died. Gregor Piatigorsky, 73, Russian-born cello virtuoso; after a long illness; in Los Angeles. First cellist of Moscow's Imperial Theater at 14, Piatigorsky moved to the U.S. and made his debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1929. After 1962 he taught at the University of Southern California along with his friend Jascha Heifetz. An enormous man with huge hands, Piatigorsky was a master of the sweeping line and romantic phrasing. A performer, he said, must constantly strive "to make the music as good as it really is." -

Died. Monroe Jackson Rathbone, 76, former president, board chairman and chief executive officer of Standard Oil Co. of N.J. (now Exxon Corp.) from 1954 to 1965; of a heart attack; in Baton Rouge, La. Big, bald "Mr. Jack," whose great-uncle was General Thomas ("Stonewall") Jackson, began his 44-year career with Standard Oil as a chem ical engineer. He made "Jersey," as he called it, the most international of the oil companies and raised its profits to over $1 billion in 1964.

Died. Lord Thomson of Fleet, 82, international press czar; a month after suffering a stroke; in London. A debt-plagued salesman in rural Ontario during the Depression, Roy Herbert Thomson floated a loan to set up a small radio station, then acquired a struggling newspaper, the Timmins (Ont.) Press. From this slender base he built one of the world's largest press and broadcasting empires: more than 140 newspapers and dozens of magazines, TV and radio stations, mostly in Canada, the U.S. and Britain. In London, which became his base of operations in the 1950s, he picked up a powerful group of Fleet Street papers including, in 1966, the prestigious Times of London. A certified "press lord" long before he was made a baron of the realm in 1964, Thomson was never a journalist. "I buy newspapers to make money to buy more newspapers to make more money," he once said. "As for editorial content, that's the stuff you separate the ads with."

Died. Fritz Lang, 85, Viennese-born film director of early German suspense thrillers (Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler, M) and Hollywood melodramas (Fury); after a long illness; in Los Angeles. A tall, terse perfectionist, Lang was "profoundly fascinated by cruelty, fear, horror and death." M, for example, was a horrifying study of a compulsive child murderer. When his next film, The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse (1932), was banned by the Third Reich, Lang fled to Hollywood, where he spent 20 highly successful years working with stars like Spencer Tracy and Henry Fonda in a variety of social melodramas, westerns and thrillers.

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