Legendary film director dies

Director Blake Edwards has died in California at the age of 88.

Edwards, married to British actress Julie Andrews, died from complications of pneumonia on Wednesday morning at St John’s Health Centre in Santa Monica.

Edwards directed many classic films, including The Pink Panther.

He was “pretty much confined to a wheelchair for the last year-and-a-half,” after unsuccessful knee operations, publicist Gene Schwam said.

At the time of his death, Edwards was working on two Broadway musicals, one based on the Pink Panther. The other, Big Rosemary, was to be an original comedy set during Prohibition, Schwam said. A third-generation film maker, Edwards was praised for evoking classic performances from Jack Lemmon, Audrey Hepburn, Peter Sellers, Dudley Moore, Lee Remick and Andrews, his wife of nearly half a century.

He directed and often wrote a wide variety of movies.

Although many of his films were hits, he was nominated for Academy Awards only twice.

The motion picture academy selected Edwards to receive a lifetime achievement award in 2004 for “his writing, directing and producing an extraordinary body of work”.