Director Blake Edwards dies

Film director Blake Edwards, whose work included Breakfast at Tiffany's and the Pink Panther movies, has died aged 88.

A spokesman said Edwards died on Wednesday night from complications arising from pneumonia at St John's Health Center in Santa Monica with his actress wife Julie Andrews and close family by his side.

Edwards was a major Hollywood player in the 1960s. His work as a director during that decade included the classic Breakfast at Tiffany's with Audrey Hepburn, and Days of Wine and Roses with Jack Lemmon.

His first Pink Panther film in 1963 helped make a huge star out of a young Peter Sellers, and cemented Edwards' own fame as a director with a keen eye for cutting edge humour.

"The most fun and the worst times were with Peter," Edwards said in an interview in 2002, when the Writers Guild of America gave him a lifetime achievement award. "When he was at the top of his form, he was great fun. When he was in his depressed, angry world, he was impossible."

Edwards would go on to make several Pink Panther movies that became box office hits, with Sellers playing bumbling French detective Chief Inspector Clouseau. Sellers died in 1980.

But like so many careers in Hollywood, Edwards saw his share of lows, too. Movies such as Darling Lili flopped at the box office, and for a period in the 1970s, his phone stopped ringing.

In 1982, Edwards landed back on top of the heap after writing and directing Andrews in gender-bending comedy Victor Victoria, in which his wife played a struggling female singer who finds success when she masquerades as a man.

Edwards was born William Blake Crump on July 26, 1922 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, He tried acting in the 1940s, but by late that decade turned to writing and later directing. He was married twice, the second time in 1969 to Andrews.

They were married for 41 years and raised five children together, three from separate marriages and two they adopted.