ROSE WILLIAMS, PLAYWRIGHT'S SISTER, AT AGE 86.

Byline: The New York Times

Rose Williams, Tennessee Williams' sister, who was the model for Laura Wingfield, the shy, lame young woman in ``The Glass Menagerie,'' died Thursday at Phelps Memorial Hospital in Tarrytown, N.Y. She was 86, and had moved to the hospital from the Bethel Methodist Home in Ossining, N.Y.

The cause was cardiac arrest, said Michael Remer, a lawyer for the Tennessee Williams trust.

Williams was immortalized in fictional guise in her brother's work, first in his short story, ``Portrait of a Girl in Glass.'' That story inspired ``The Glass Menagerie,'' the memory play that was Tennessee Williams' first Broadway success, in 1945. In his notes to the play, the playwright said that Laura ``is like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf.''

In ``Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams,'' Lyle Leverich, the playwright's authorized biographer, wrote, ``Throughout his life, Tennessee Williams had two overriding devotions: his career as a writer and his sister, Rose.''

Rose Isabel Williams was born in Columbus, Miss., in 1919, two years before her brother, Thomas (later Tennessee). The two grew up together. As a young woman, Williams was schizophrenic and she underwent a prefrontal lobotomy and was institutionalized for the rest of her life.

In his ``Memoirs,'' Tennessee Williams said: ``You couldn't ask for a sweeter or more benign monarch than Rose, or, in my opinion, one that's more of a lady. After all, high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.''

The playwright died in 1983. In Tennessee Williams' will, most of his estate was left to the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., with the bulk of it to remain in trust for his sister during her lifetime. The University of the South announced that with Williams' death, the university would receive some $7 million.

Since 1989, the university has been receiving income from the Williams estate, using it for scholarships and for the Sewanee Writers Conference, which has brought such writers as Arthur Miller and William Styron to the university campus.

Tennessee Williams made the bequest in honor of his grandfather, the Rev. Walter E. Dakin, who studied at the university's School of Theology in the late 1890s. In his will, the playwright specified that the gift was to encourage creative writers whose work was ``progressive, original and preferably of an experimental nature.''