Milestones

By Melissa August, Elizabeth L. Bland, Unmesh Kher and Aatish Taseer

PLEADED GUILTY. ANDREW FASTOW, 42, former chief financial officer of Enron; to two felony counts of participating in crimes that contributed to the company's bankruptcy; in Houston. The plea deal requires him to pay more than $23 million in civil and criminal penalties and serve a probable 10-year sentence.

DIED. OLIVIA GOLDSMITH, 54, social satirist whose debut novel, The First Wives Club, became a best-selling revenge fantasy for women dumped by their husbands for younger second wives; from a heart attack while under anesthesia during plastic surgery; in New York City.

DIED. HAROLD SHIPMAN, 57, British physician and serial killer known as "Dr. Death"; a suicide by hanging; in his London prison cell, where he was serving 15 life sentences, one for each person he was convicted of murdering. An investigation later revealed he had killed as many as 260 patients over 23 years, most of them women living alone whom he visited for checkups and injected with fatal doses of heroin.

DIED. RON O'NEAL, 66, whose role as a violent, street-smart cocaine dealer who beats the system and leaves the drug world a wealthy man in the hit 1972 movie Superfly epitomized the blaxploitation genre; of pancreatic cancer; in Los Angeles.

DIED. ARNE NAESS JR., 66, Norwegian shipping magnate and ex-husband of pop diva Diana Ross; after falling 320 ft. while climbing in the Franschhoek mountains; in Cape Town, South Africa. Married to Ross for 14 years until their divorce in 2000, he was an ecologist and experienced mountaineer who conquered Mount Everest in 1985.

DIED. JAKE HESS, 76, Southern gospel pioneer and early influence on Elvis Presley; in Opelika, Ala. The youngest of 12 children, Hess began singing in 1948 and starred in the seminal Christian music group the Statesmen Quartet. As a teenager in Memphis, Presley often attended Statesmen shows, and Hess later sang backup on the King's albums.

DIED. UTA HAGEN, 84, revered stage actress and acting teacher best known for originating the role of Martha in Edward Albee's 1962 Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; in New York City. Born in Germany and raised in Wisconsin, she began her career in London in 1937 as Ophelia in Eva Le Gallienne's Hamlet. She later won acclaim for her Nina in Chekhov's The Seagull and as the wife of an alcoholic actor in Clifford Odets' The Country Girl. In the late 1940s, she and her second husband, actor-director Herbert Berghof, started HB Studio, a widely respected performing-arts school in New York City.

DIED. GEORGETTE KLINGER, 88, fashionable skin-care pioneer of the 1940s whose European facial techniques laid the basis for today's multibillion-dollar spa industry; in New York City. Born in what is now the Czech Republic, she fought acne as a child and began experimenting with her own cures when traditional dermatology treatments failed. Her view that the face is something to be treated rather than just decorated inspired a revolution in cosmetic skin care.

DIED. CLEMENT CONGER, 91, White House and State Department curator who restored diplomatic reception rooms to their grandeur in the late 19th century; in Delray Beach, Fla. Known in Washington as "the Grand Acquisitor," he amassed an Americana collection of antiques and fine art worth more than $100 million, one of the largest in the world.