ILL. Mamie Eisenhower, 82, widow of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, after suffering a stroke in her Gettysburg, Pa., home and being rushed to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Frail and bedridden for several months, the former First Lady is reported to have "some loss of function" in her right side and difficulty forming sentences.

ILL. Rose Kennedy, 89, matriarch of the Kennedy clan; after undergoing surgery to repair an intestinal hernia; in Boston. "The operation went well," her physician reported. "She's a tough old gal. She was swimming just two days ago."

DIED. Gracie Fields, 81, sassy English chanteuse and actress who started as a shilling-a-week trouper in working men's clubs and in her heyday became the world's highest-paid star; in Capri, Italy. Born Grace Stansfield in the mill town of Rochdale, she sang at age eight in the local cinema. Though never a beauty and hardly a diva, she set music halls roaring in the '20s with her cheeky Lancastrian banter, stouthearted warbling and flea-scratching, "low-but-clean" brand of clowning. Her 1931 film debut in Sally in Our Alley gave her a theme song, Sally, and endeared her to all England as "Our Gracie." During World War II she toured wherever there were Allied troops and then raised $1 million for British war relief before settling in Capri in 1952. A philanthropist who gave away some $2 million, she was royally dubbed Dame Fields in a ceremony last January.

DIED. John Cromwell, 91, stage and screen actor, director and producer for more than 70 years; of a blood clot in the lung; in Santa Barbara, Calif. Lured from Broadway to Hollywood in 1928, he directed Tom Sawyer, Of Human Bondage and Algiers. A founder of the Screen Directors' Guild, Cromwell was hounded out of Hollywood in the early '50s for his pro-labor leanings. Last year he reappeared on the screen in Robert Altman's A Wedding.

DIED. Alexandra Tolstoy, 95, last surviving daughter of Russian Author Leo Tolstoy; in Valley Cottage, N.Y. The eleventh of Tolstoy's twelve children and a favorite of his, "Sasha" became her father's secretary at 17 and executor of his will in 1910. She never married because, she said, "I didn't want to exchange my father for someone else." After working as a nurse on the front lines of World War I, she became active in anti-Bolshevik intellectual circles, and was arrested five times and jailed for a year. In 1931 she immigrated to the U.S., where she wrote, lectured and ran several chicken farms. In 1939 she founded the Tolstoy Foundation in Valley Cottage to aid and absorb refugees from Soviet bloc countries and, she said, "to interpret to the Western world the present-day tragedy of the Russian people."

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