MARRIED. Vincente Minnelli, 76, Academy Award-winning director (Gigi, 1958) and father, by a previous marriage to the late Judy Garland, of Entertainer Liza Minnelli; and his longtime companion, Lee Anderson, fiftyish, British-born publicist and Hollywood socialite; he for the fourth time, she for the third; in Beverly Hills, Calif.

DIED. James Cleveland ("Jesse") Owens, 66, track-and-field legend who, by winning four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, dashed Adolf Hitler's dreams of demonstrating Aryan supremacy; of lung cancer; in Tucson (see SPORT).

DIED. Annunzio Paolo Mantovani, 74, mood-music maestro whose lush, homogenized sound made him the first musician to sell a million stereo albums in the U.S.; after a prolonged illness; in Tunbridge Wells, England. The Venetian-born, British-educated son of a Covent Garden concertmaster began his own career at 16 as a classical violinist. Though he conducted London's Hotel Metropole Orchestra and his own Tipica Orchestra in concerts, BBC broadcasts and on records in the 1920s, '30s and '40s, and later became music director for Playwright Noel Coward, Mantovani was little known outside of Britain until 1951, when he created his silken "shimmering strings" effects and recorded the waltz Charmaine. The recording, monomaniacally promoted by a Cleveland disc jockey, triggered a Mantovani craze that turned his American concerts into sellout affairs and seven albums into gold (more than half a million of each were sold). Said the purveyor of Greensleeves, Misty and Moulin Rouge: "Perhaps 25% of the people like the classics, and about 25% like the Beatles. I aim to please the 50% in the middle."

DIED. Ton Due Thang, 91, figurehead President of North Viet Nam after the death of Ho Chi Minn in 1969 and the only man to serve as President since the country's 1976 reunification with South Viet Nam; of a heart attack; in Hanoi. The choice of the southern-born "Uncle Ton," a longtime Communist Party faithful, as successor to the legendary Ho was a compromise designed to forestall a power struggle between more influential leaders in the party. While Ton's presidency was largely ceremonial in character, the power of the office is now likely to be expanded.

DIED. Stanley Reed, 95, Supreme Court Justice from 1938 to 1957; in a nursing home in Huntington, N.Y. The lanky, aristocratic Reed made his name as a farm cooperative law expert in his native Kentucky before Herbert Hoover tapped him to be general counsel of the Federal Farm Board in 1929. Named to the high court by Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was known as a quietly reliable supporter of New Deal and civil rights legislation, and a wild card on most other issues.

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