DIED. Robert Shaw, 51, fiery character actor, novelist and playwright who parlayed his rugged good looks and powerful screen presence into late-blooming Hollywood stardom; of a heart attack; in Tourmakeady, Ireland. Shaw wrote five novels, critically acclaimed in his native Britain, and rewrote one, The Man in the Glass Booth, as a successful Broadway play directed by Harold Pinter. But he was best known as an actor, first on the London stage (Tiger at the Gates, The Long and the Short and the Tall), later in American movies, where he portrayed a wide-ranging gallery of rogues. Among them: a sinister assassin in From Russia with Love, Henry VIII in A Man for All Seasons, a glowering Irish gangster in The Sting and, in his most popular role, the shark hunter Quint in Jaws.

DIED. John J. Wrathall, 65, President of Rhodesia, who served from 1964 to 1975 as his country's Finance Minister; of a heart attack; in Salisbury. One of Rhodesia's chief strategists in its fight against U.N. trade sanctions, the British-born Wrathall frequently lambasted London for participating in the embargo that followed his country's declaration of independence in 1965. Appointed to the figurehead presidency by Prime Minister Ian Smith in 1976, Wrathall had been expected to vacate his office at year's end, in favor of a black Rhodesian.

DIED. F. van Wyck Mason, 76, prolific and bestselling historical novelist (among his more than 60 books: Three Harbours, Stars on the Sea, Cutlass Empire); of a heart attack while swimming; near Southampton, Bermuda. A skilled storyteller especially interested in colonial and Civil War America, Mason embellished his complex plots with minute detail and romantic flourish. He also penned a popular series of tales of intrigue featuring Captain (later Major and Colonel) Hugh North, and during World War II served as chief military historian for Dwight Eisenhower's SHAEF command.

DIED. Bruce Catton, 78, pre-eminent Civil War historian and journalist who won a 1954 Pulitzer Prize for his first trilogy's concluding volume, A Stillness at Appomattox; in Frankfort, Mich. As a child, Catton listened to the yarns of Civil War veterans in his Michigan home town. A World War I veteran who pursued a peacetime career as a newspaperman, he tried to write a Civil War novel when he was 50. "I got 200 pages down, and it was awful," he recalled. "But the factual parts, where the armies were moving, when the battles were fought, that wasn't bad," He skimmed off the fiction, and the result was Mr. Lincoln's Army, the first of his 13 elegiac, historical summaries that re-create the Civil War in a sweep of colorful detail. Catton also worked as senior editor of the hardbound American Heritage: The Magazine of History.

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