Hollywood loses a laughter legend...

Screenwriter, producer and director Blake Edwards, famous for the Peter Sellers Pink Panther film cycle and for the 1979 hit 10, has died of complications in a case of pneumonia at Santa Monica.

Aged 88, Edwards was a powerful force in Hollywood comedies for nearly half a century - though many are surprised to see his name appear in the Audrey Hepburn classic Breakfast At Tiffany's, and other forays into different genres.

Edwards was born into a theatrical and cinematically-oriented family, and started his screenwriting career in Chandler country, churning out humorous detective-genre scripts, which pursuit ultimately led him to create the 'tec series Peter Gunn, the famous theme music to which was scored by Henry Mancini, later to collaborate with Edwards on the Pink Panther movies.

Edwards' greatest screen legacy remains his two-decade collaboration with Peter Sellers on the tales of the inept Inspector Clouseau, beginning with The Pink Panther in 1963. Five sequels followed, from 1964's A Shot in the Dark, up to the elaborate and almost Bond-like Revenge of the Pink Panther in 1978 - off-cuts of which were used to create the little-regarded Trail of the Pink Panther two years after Sellers' death in 1980. A number of attempts to revive the character in Sellers' absence proved unsuccessful.

Edwards found a new lease of Hollywood success with the discovery of Bo Derek and the cinematic potential of Britain's Dudley Moore in 10 (1979). The film featured Edwards' wife Julie Andrews, who was also to star in S.O.B. (1981) and the utterly charming gender-bending tale Victor Victoria (1983). It also launched Dudley Moore on an unexpected Hollywood hot-streak which perhaps peaked a year later with Arthur, but saw the late Moore as a bankable Hollywood player for a good deal of the 1980s.

In the 2004 biopic The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, Edwards was played by John Lithgow, and his love-hate relationship with the increasingly reluctant 'Inspector Clouseau' actor was portrayed with great affection.

Blake Edwards leaves behind his wife Julie Andrews and four children. And a hell of a lot of laughter. Not too shabby, as epitaphs go.

IMDB

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