Milestones

By Melissa August; Unmesh Kher; Lina Lofaro; Kate Novack

DIED. PHILLIP GOLDMAN, 39, Silicon Valley entrepreneur who co-founded WebTV, a company that enabled people to surf the Internet from their television sets; of undetermined causes; in Los Altos Hills, Calif. After selling WebTV in 1997 to Microsoft for $425 million, he went on to create Mailblocks, a service to block junk e-mail.

DIED. ANITA MUI, 40, sultry pop star whose torrid concerts earned her the tag the Asian Madonna; of complications from cervical cancer; in Hong Kong. She sold more than 10 million albums and was a charismatic actress in Hong Kong films, notably as a ghost lover in Rouge, as a Japanese spy in Kawashima Yoshiko and as Tung the Wonder Woman in The Heroic Trio.

DIED. GERALD GUTIERREZ, 53, Tony Award--winning theater director; of respiratory failure resulting from the flu; in New York City. Though he periodically left the theater--for a year at Yale Law School (at age 49) and a stint as a chef's apprentice--he always returned to the stage, helming such acclaimed Lincoln Center productions as the 1992 revival of Frank Loesser's musical The Most Happy Fella, a Tony-winning 1996 production of Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance and last season's spiffy revival of Dinner at Eight.

DIED. HOPE LANGE, 70, film, stage and television actress who won an Oscar nomination for her performance as a troubled teenage girl in the 1957 movie soap opera Peyton Place; of an intestinal infection; in Santa Monica, Calif. Her blond beauty once rankled Marilyn Monroe (before letting Lange appear alongside her in Bus Stop, Monroe demanded that Lange's hair be dyed brown) and won her parts in such 1950s films as The Young Lions. But she was better known for her matronly, Emmy-winning role as a widow living in a haunted seaside home in TV's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

DIED. VESTAL GOODMAN, 74, Grammy-winning singer known as "the Queen of Gospel"; of complications from the flu; in Celebration, Fla. With her elaborate hairdos and the trademark white handkerchief she waved at audiences, Goodman and her husband Happy dazzled fans in live performances that were reminiscent of early camp-meeting evangelism. In five decades together, the Happy Goodman Family act recorded 15 No. 1 gospel hits.

DIED. CHARLES BERLITZ, 90, linguist and author who explored the paranormal; in Tamarac, Fla. A grandson of the founder of the Berlitz language schools and a onetime head of the company's publications, he reportedly spoke more than 30 languages. But it was his 1974 best seller The Bermuda Triangle, on the disappearance of planes and ships in an area of the Atlantic Ocean, that made him internationally famous.