RESIGNED. Ella Grasso, 61, popular, twice-elected Democratic Governor of Connecticut whose victory in 1974 made her the first woman to govern a state without succeeding her husband; by reason of "physical disability" resulting from cancer of the liver; in Hartford, Conn. Daughter of immigrants from Italy's Piedmont region, she rose through the state legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives, marrying a school principal, Thomas Grasso, and rearing a daughter and son along the way. In a typically forthright announcement, she said she would yield to Lieutenant Governor William A. O'Neill as of Jan. 1 because she no longer had "the stamina or the endurance" to handle the job.

DIED. Francisco Sa Carneiro, 46, Prime Minister of Portugal whose rightist Democratic Alliance had given his country its first stable government since the overthrow of Marcello Caetano in 1974; in a plane crash that also killed Minister of

Defense Adeline Amaro da Costa; in Lisbon (see WORLD).

DIED. Romain Gary, 66, Lithuanian-born hero of the Free French, diplomat and novelist (The Roots of Heaven, Lady L), whose former wife, Actress Jean Seberg, committed suicide last year; of a self-inflicted gunshot wound; in Paris. Gary met Seberg, his second wife, while serving as France's consul general in Los Angeles in the late 1950s. They were divorced in 1970. Last year he charged that the FBI had brought on her miscarriage and eventual suicide by leaking a story that falsely claimed she was pregnant by a member of the Black Panther Party. In a final note to his publisher, Gary disclaimed any connection between Seberg's death and his own. In answer to the question "Why then?" he cited the title of his autobiographical volume The Night Will Be Peaceful and quoted its last words: "I have finally explained myself fully."

DIED. Dorothy Day, 83, the guiding spirit of the Catholic Worker movement, a tireless activist, reformer and comforter of the poor and downtrodden; of heart disease; in New York City (see RELIGION).

DIED. Oswald Ernald Mosley, 84, dashing, charismatic leader of the British Union of Fascists whose army of anti-Semitic Blackshirts fomented hatred in London during the 1930s; in Orsay, France. A brilliant but impatient thinker and a gifted orator, Sir Oswald (he inherited the title from his father, an English baronet) was elected to Parliament at age 22 as a Conservative, later became an independent, then a Socialist Laborite, and finally embraced the ideology of Mussolini and Hitler. Held in detention as a national security risk during World War II, he later exiled himself to a villa in France. His son, Novelist Nicholas Mosley, said of him: "I see clearly that while the right hand dealt with grandiose ideas and glory, the left hand let the rat out of the sewer."

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