DIED. Charles H. Wilson, 67, little-known nine-term Democratic Congressman from California (1963-80) until he was first reprimanded by the House of Representatives in 1978 for his part in the Koreagate scandal, then censured in 1980 for other ethics violations, the only member of Congress ever so doubly and dubiously distinguished; of a heart attack; in Clinton, Md.

DIED. James Mason, 75, suave Svengali of British and Hollywood films for a half-century; of a heart attack; in Lausanne, Switzerland. Mason took a Cambridge architecture degree but was soon displaying his haunted good looks and claret baritone on the London stage and screen. In scores of romantic melodramas, from The Seventh Veil (1945) to The Deadly Affair (1967), he polished his image as the ruthless lover. Behind his sophisticated sadism there was often the suggestion of a dark past and a doomed future, shrouding such troubled protagonists as the Irish fugitive in Odd Man Out (1946), Rommel in The Desert Fox (1951) and The Desert Rats (1953), and the drunken Norman Maine in A Star Is Born (1954). As his matinee-idol features aged, his performances became comically macabre: his Humbert Humbert in Lolita (1962) is a tour de force of nympholeptic longing. In his last decade, Mason lived as a Swiss squire, occasionally playing featured roles in international films.

DIED. George Gallup, 82, quintessential quantifier of American public opinion for more than five decades on issues ranging from toothpaste tastes to presidential preferences; of a heart attack; in Thun, Switzerland. An Iowa farm boy who grew restless on a summer job interviewing readers of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, he devised, for a Ph.D. thesis, sampling techniques that sought to account for the diversity of potential respondents; he put these techniques to work for newspapers, then for advertising.

Convinced that his methods were valid for political choices as well, Gallup boldly predicted in 1936 that the then dominant poll would be wrong in predicting victory for Republican Landon over Incumbent Roosevelt. Though Gallup would sometimes err, notably in 1948, when he picked Dewey over Truman, the weekly polls of his American Institute of Public Opinion and its imitators have put politicians and others in instantaneous, generally reliable contact with the public pulse and have permanently altered the conduct and the outcome of U.S. marketing and electioneering strategy.