MILESTONES

By KATHLEEN ADAMS, CHRISTINE GORMAN, LINA LOFARO, MICHAEL QUINN, SRIBALA SUBRAMANIAN AND SIDNEY URQUHART

BACK AT WORK. NEIL RUDENSTINE, 60, president of Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rudenstine took a leave of absence from the high-pressured position last November, citing exhaustion. He recuperated by listening to music, reading books and sunning-in the Caribbean.

EXPECTING. Political odd couple MARY MATALIN, 41, ex-Bush campaign aide, and JAMES CARVILLE, 50, Clinton strategist; a baby girl, sometime in July, to be named Matalin Mary Carville; in Washington.

DIED. MELVIN FRANKLIN, 52, singer; from a series of seizures; in Los Angeles. Franklin's impossibly deep, stirringly smooth bass line anchored the Temptations-Motown's premiere male ensemble-through a string of Top 10 hits beginning with The Way You Do the Things You Do in 1964. Only one of the original quintet, Otis Williams, remains alive.

DIED. ART KANE, 69, photographer whose famous 1958 portrait of dozens of living jazz legends for Esquire is the subject of a new documentary; of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound; in Lancaster, Kentucky. The film, A Great Day in Harlem, has been nominated for an Oscar.

DIED. ROBERT BOLT, 70, playwright and screenwriter; after years of declining health; in southern England. The theme of an individual's struggle for moral equilibrium in the face of world-shattering historical events runs through much of Bolt's work, from his career-making play, 1960's A Man for All Seasons, which he fashioned into an Oscar-winning screenplay for the 1966 movie version, to his scripts for the David Lean epics Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Dr. Zhivago (1965)-the latter earning Bolt an Oscar.

DIED. MICHAEL GAZZO, 71, actor, playwright and screenwriter; of complications from a stroke; in Los Angeles. Gazzo's A Hatful of Rain was a mid-'50s stage hit that depicted a drug-addicted Korean War veteran with sympathy and, for its time, compelling realism. The work enjoyed a second life as a praised film in 1957. Gazzo's screenplays included the Elvis Presley vehicle King Creole. Gazzo also made his mark in front of the cameras, portraying a succession of screen heavies and winning an Oscar nomination in 1974 for his appearance as the turncoat mobster Frank Pentangeli in The Godfather, Part II.

DIED. JAMES HERRIOT, 78, veterinary surgeon turned best-selling author; at his northern England home near Thirsk, Yorkshire. The Scottish-born James Alfred Wight did not begin writing until his early 50s, when he took the pen name Herriot and soon made up for lost time. His charming anecdotes of life as an English country vet tapped into the urban reader's apparently bottomless appetite for pastoral simplicity and infirm animals; All Creatures Great and Small, published in the U.S. in 1972, made Herriot a literary sensation-a status further enhanced by the popular BBC series based on his work. His 20 books were eventually translated into 20 languages. Meanwhile, British veterinary schools became swamped with applicants, and Herriot's practice in Thirsk (Darrowby in his books) was besieged by tourists attracted by the aggressive marketing of North Yorkshire as "Herriot Country."

DIED. YAN CHERNYAK, 85, Soviet master spy who created a powerful espionage network in Germany from 1930 to 1945; in Moscow. After the war, Chernyak had a major but still undisclosed role in the development of the Soviet nuclear-weapons program.