Milestones: May 14, 1984

EXPECTING. Pia Zadora, 28, sex-kitten actress (next movie: a sci-fi musical comedy, Voyage of the Rock Aliens); and Meshulam Riklis, 60, her industrialist husband of 6½ years and her biggest fan and promoter: their first child (he has three children by previous marriages); in December.

DIED. Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, 40, Colombia’s Minister of Justice; by assassination, when two gunmen on a motorcycle pulled up to his car and shot him eight times with a machine gun; in Bogota. The first Colombian law-enforcement boss to wage a vigorous campaign against his country’s powerful drug traffickers, Lara refused to wear a bulletproof jacket despite death threats. One of the two hitmen died immediately when the motorcycle crashed; the other, captured minutes later, claimed that “everything was arranged in Medellin,” center of Colombia’s $5 billion-a-year drug trade. After the killing, the government changed an earlier stance and announced that it would extradite accused Colombian drug kingpins to face charges in the U.S.

DIED. Diana Dors, 52, Britain’s platinum-blond bombshell who was endlessly touted in the 1950s as her country’s answer to Marilyn Monroe; of cancer; in Windsor, England. Like Monroe, Dors had brains and talent, but was wasted in a spate of Hollywood clunkers (I Married a Woman) before being dropped by RKO. She retained Britons’ affection, however, and even after ballooning to Wagnerian-soprano proportions played comic and character parts in theater and TV.

DIED. Jack Barry, 66, smooth founding father, producer and host of TV game shows, whose many creations included Concentration, The Joker’s Wild and Tic Tac Dough; of a heart attack; in New York City. By 1958 he had four popular quiz shows on TV, among them the superhit Twenty One, with $129,000 Winner Charles Van Doren. Then investigations revealed Van Doren and other contestants had been coached. The resulting scandal wiped quiz shows, and Barry, off the air for years until he came back from near penury with Joker and others.

DIED. Kevin Lynch, 66, pioneering urban theorist who, in such books as The Image of the City (1960) and Site Planning (1962), studied the structure and diversity of cities, analyzed how residents perceived and organized that diversity, and suggested ways to improve the coherence and vividness of landmarks and open spaces to give city dwellers a sense of place and direction; of a heart attack; in Gay Head, Mass.

DIED. Alan Schneider, 66, consummate stage director best known for his productions of plays by Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee and Harold Pinter; of brain injuries received when he was hit by a motorcycle; in London. Schneider was noted for his exacting fidelity to even the most complex script, as he worked to transmit the inner truth of a play rather than impose on it any other vision. He crusaded particularly for Beckett, and his productions of Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape, among others, profoundly influenced the course of modern theater. Also closely associated with Albee, Schneider won a 1962 Tony Award for directing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Throughout his career, he resisted any single approach to theater, alternating between commercial and workshop projects, Broadway and regional stages, avant-garde and conventional plays. He once professed disappointment at not directing more classics, but then observed, “A number of the plays I directed when they were new have turned out to be classics. If one didn’t get to do King Lear, Endgame, after all, comes close.”

DIED. Gordon Jenkins, 73, pop-music arranger and conductor whose shimmering, swirling string backgrounds enhanced the performances, on records and TV, of such stars as Judy Garland, Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra; of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease); in Malibu, Calif. Pianist Jenkins started composing and arranging with the Swing Era’s big bands, wrote Benny Goodman’s closing theme, Goodbye, and won a Grammy Award for his stylish 1965 arrangement of Sinatra’s It Was a Very Good Year.