Milestones

DIED. Joan Wilson, 56, TV producer who kept even blase viewers riveted to their sets on Sunday evenings with the British mini-series she imported from 1973 on for PBS's Emmy Award-winning Masterpiece Theater, including such classics as Upstairs, Downstairs; I, Claudius; and last season's The Jewel in the Crown;of cancer; in Boston.

DIED. Arnold Ray Miller, 62, former president of the United Mine Workers of America, who in 1972 mounted a successful insurgent candidacy that brought increased democracy to the union and in 1974 negotiated a contract widely regarded as the best ever, but whose leadership was subsequently plagued by factional power struggles, rank-and-file dissension and finally the failing health that led to his 1979 resignation; of pneumonia; in Charleston, W. Va.

DIED. Sheldon R. Luce, 76, retired sheep rancher in Yolo County, Calif., and one-time colleague, in advertising sales and corporate affairs, of his elder brother, Time Inc. Founder Henry Luce; of pneumonia after heart surgery; in Palo Alto, Calif.

DIED. Gardner ("Mike") Cowles Jr., 82, founder-publisher of Look magazine; of a heart attack; in Southampton, N. Y. His father had built a newspaper empire, and after young Mike and his late brother John took over the flagship Des Moines Register, they began to buy radio stations in the 1930s. In 1937 the Cowleses launched a new picture magazine two months after the debut of LIFE, and Look, too, quickly became a financial success. He followed up, however, with a string of magazine failures. In 1971, battered by advertising losses to TV, Look went under. With the family newspaper chain also in long decline, even the Register was sold two weeks ago.

DIED. Simon Kuznets, 84, Ukrainian-born economist, statistician and professor emeritus at Harvard, who won the 1971 Nobel Prize for his development in the 1930s of the first sophisticated system for measuring the gross national product, the now indispensable means for gauging comparative economic activity and income distribution by computing the total value of each nation's goods and services; in Cambridge, Mass.

DIED. Charlotte Aldegonde Elisabeth Marie Wilhelmine, 89, beloved Grand Duchess and constitutional ruler of Luxembourg from 1919 until 1964, when she abdicated in favor of her son Grand Duke Jean, the present head of state; at Fischbach Castle near Luxembourg City. Chosen in a special post-World War I plebiscite to replace her German-leaning older sister, she tended to her largely ceremonial duties with intelligence, charm and a lack of pomp. During World War II, her radio broadcasts from exile in Great Britain did much to build morale. Afterward, she helped guide her tiny principality (998 sq. mi., pop. 365,000), wedged between West Germany, France and Belgium, to high living standards, enlightened social policies and founding membership in the European Community.