Revered American film director, Robert Aldrich, who died on 5 December, 1983, was responsible for a string of the most popular Hollywood movies in modern cinema including ‘What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?’ and ‘The Dirty Dozen’.

With his distinctive and original style, he earned a reputation early on for realistic and socially conscious films, and, over a career that spanned 30 years, went on to help to transform American cinema.

Today, Mr Aldrich is remembered not only as a talented director, but a fearless, genre-busting producer and writer. He also stood as President of the Director’s Guild of America (DGA) from 1975-1979.

In recognition of his work, the DGA created the annual Robert B. Aldrich Award in 1984 for extraordinary service to the Guild and its membership.

Robert Burgess Aldrich was born on 9 August, 1918, in Rhode Island, USA. The son of a newspaper publisher and grandson of a US Senator, he spent much of his privileged youth playing football at the local Moses Brown School.

Growing older, he attended the University of Virginia to study economics. However, by 1941, he found himself far more interested in the movies and, as a result, dropped out of university to take a job at RKO Pictures as a production clerk.

Here, he moved rapidly up the production ladder, taking on various roles including production manager, associate producer and even assistant director to such greats as Charlie Chaplin and Jean Renoir.

He spent much of the early 1950s writing and directing for television until, in 1953, he directed his debut feature ‘The Big Leaguer’. Although it had little effect on the industry, a further low-budget feature, ‘World for Ransom,’ convinced Burt Lancaster’s company ‘Hecht-Lancaster’ to hire Aldrich to helm ‘Apache’.

The film was a huge success and inspired Mr Aldrich and Burt Lancaster to team up once again to shoot influential Western ‘Vera Cruz’ less than a year later.

With two box-office triumphs under his belt, he continued to impress at an astonishing rate with the masterful film-noir ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ in 1955, award-winning ‘The Big Knife’ that same year and antiwar film ‘Attack’ in 1956. He even formed his own production company, ‘Aldrich and Associates’.

A deal with Colombia which fell apart in 1957 when he was fired during production of ‘The Garment Jungle’ briefly curtailed his success. He later summed up the period 1958 to 1962 as “four bad films and the dissolution of a marriage”.

However, by 1962 he had managed to rejuvenate his career with the release of the tragicomedy ‘What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?’ starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford .

‘Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte’ followed, and the infamous ‘The Dirty Dozen’ became 1967’s highest-grossing release. Its immense success with audiences finally allowed him to buy a studio and, over the next few years, finance his own films. Nevertheless, the end of the Sixties and dawn of the Seventies undoubtably saw a significant decline in the standard of Mr Aldrich’s output.

His last true masterpiece was surely ‘Ulzana’s Raid,’ a stunning Western released in 1972 to critical acclaim. He died just over a decade later on 5 December, 1983, in Los Angeles of kidney failure.

Despite a series of box office flops during the 1960s, Aldrich remains one of the undisputed ‘golden boys’ of post-war commercial cinema.

His films delighted audiences on both sides of the Atlantic for decades and will continue to do so for generations to come. Of all his work, one of his personal favourites was ‘The Killing of Sister George’. The film’s controversial lesbian lovemaking scene reportedly so disgusted Mr Aldrich’s long-time composer friend Frank De Vol that he quit the production and did not work with him for some time after.