* Tony Diamond; Veterans Activist

Tony Diamond, 65, longtime USO performer and founder of BRAVO, a nonprofit group serving veterans. Born Frank Anthony Pacelli in Paterson, N.J., Diamond served in the Army during the Korean War, using his talents as a comedian to entertain soldiers. After the war, he adopted the stage name of Tony Diamond and performed on the comedy circuit and on Broadway. During the Vietnam War he volunteered as an entertainer for the USO to entertain GIs on the front lines, in hospitals and aboard Navy ships in the South China Sea. In 1970, after four tours with the USO in Vietnam, he was booed offstage back at home when he referred in his routine to his USO work. He threw a picnic in a park for veterans, which led a year later to his co-founding BRAVO--Brotherhood Rally of All Veterans Organization--with the late actor Tom Tully. Based in Calabasas, where Diamond lived, BRAVO organized events to help veterans, including the National Veterans Unity Conference in Los Angeles attended by 300 representatives of grass-roots veterans groups in 1987, and a tour of a half-scale reproduction of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. On Sunday of cancer at his Calabasas home.

* John Lion; Founded Magic Theater

John Lion, 55, theater director who founded San Francisco’s Magic Theater. Lion was a UC Berkeley graduate student in 1967 when he staged a Eugene Ionesco play “The Lesson” as his thesis project. The production moved to Berkeley’s Steppenwolf Bar where it ran for months. That spawned a theater company that took its name from the Magic Theatre in the Hermann Hesse novel for which the Steppenwolf was named. Lion ran the company for 23 years, moving to San Francisco’s Fort Mason in the late 1970s, when the theater became nationally known for presenting cutting-edge works. Sam Shepard was playwright in residence and premiered his “Fool for Love” and “Buried Child,” which won a Pulitzer Prize, at the Magic. The theater also is known for unveiling works by playwrights Murray Mednick and Michael McClure and its alumni include actors Peter Coyote, Danny Glover, Ed Harris and Amy Madigan. Lion and the Magic Theater received the Margo Jones Award, given to producers of new work. A Baltimore native, Lion taught at Stanford University, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz and San Francisco State. Since 1993 he was producing director of the American College Theater Festival at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. This month he was to begin new duties as chairman of the theater and dance department at Cal State L.A. He was married to novelist Caroline Wiesenthal and had four children. On Sunday in Seal Beach of complications of pneumonia.

* Sunthorn Kongsompong; Led Thai Coup

Gen. Sunthorn Kongsompong, 68, general who led the 1991 coup that toppled Thailand’s civilian government. Kongsompong led the bloodless takeover that deposed Prime Minister Chatichai Choonhavan, whose government was notorious for corruption. The military government proved as corrupt as the civilian administration and ended a year later when the head of the Thai army, Gen. Suchinda Kraprayoon, tried to appoint himself prime minister. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators poured into the streets of Bangkok, and troops gunned down about 50 of them. Sunthorn went unpunished for his role in the coup and in the massacre that was known as Bloody May. He made headlines later for a marital problem that sparked a national debate over Thai men’s infidelities. The brouhaha started when his wife, Orachorn, filed a lawsuit against his mistress seeking to bar her from using the family name, alleging that the woman had damaged the family’s reputation and jeopardized its honor. It opened vigorous public debate over the treatment of wives and mistresses in a society where such things are almost never discussed in public. On Monday in Bangkok of lung cancer.