RECOVERING. Burt Lancaster, 69, rugged, resilient Oscar-winning film actor (Elmer Gantry, 1960); from a six-hour quadruple-bypass heart operation; in Los Angeles. Lancaster, whose 59 movies include From Here to Eternity and Atlantic City, is expected to leave the hospital this week.

EXECUTED. Jimmy Lee Gray, 34; for the 1976 killing of a three-year-old girl he had sexually assaulted; by cyanide gas; in Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, Miss. Gray, who spent nearly seven years on death row, was the first convict executed in Mississippi since 1964.

DIED. Lawrence P. McDonald, 48, archconservative, five-term Democratic Congressman from Georgia, one of the 269 aboard the Korean Air Lines 747 shot down by a Soviet warplane (see NATION).

DIED. Simon Oakland, 61, husky, gravel-voiced character actor; of cancer; in Cathedral City, Calif. Best known as the abrasive psychiatrist who provided tidy Freudian explanations for the murders in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Oakland also starred in three TV series (Toma, The Night Stalker, The Black Sheep Squadron) and portrayed a terminally ill cancer patient in the 1977 Pulitzer-prizewinning Broadway play The Shadow Box.

DIED. Jan Clayton, 66, actress who played the cherubic Tommy Rettig's wholesome, widowed mother on the original Lassie television series (1954-57); of cancer of the colon and related illnesses; in Los Angeles. The star of such Broadway classics as Carousel and Show Boat, Clayton sustained her career despite a number of personal crises: three divorces, the death of her eldest daughter in a 1956 auto accident, and a ten-year bout with alcoholism.

DIED. Henry ("Scoop") Jackson, 71, six-term Democratic Senator from Washington and one of the most influential figures in U.S. politics; of a massive heart attack; in Everett, Wash, (see NATION).

DIED. Charles S. Murphy, 74, influential adviser to Presidents; of heart disease; in Anne Arundel County, Md. A reticent lawyer and loyal Democrat, Murphy served as John Kennedy's Under Secretary of Agriculture and Lyndon Johnson's chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board, but he was most influential as a member of Harry Truman's "little Cabinet" of advisers and friends, who talked strategy in the White House late into the night. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.