A pioneering spirit of capitalism, the legend of the skies died at the age of 70 on April 5, 1976.

He was famous for building airplanes and setting multiple aviation records, including the world air-speed records in 1935, the fastest transcontinental air-speed record in 1937 and the fastest flight around the world in 1938.

He was also a successful Hollywood film producer and director, with a string of massive blockbusters such as Everybody’s Acting, The Outlaw and Scarface to his name.

Mr Hughes was linked romantically with many glamorous Hollywood women including Katharine Hepburn , Ava Gardner and Jane Russell.

Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. was born in Humble, Texas on September 24, 1905, although he would often claim his birthday to be on the less mundane date of Christmas Eve.

He inherited an interest in all things mechanical from his engineer father and was supposedly photographed in the local newspaper at the age of 12, as being the first boy in Houston to have a 'motorized' bicycle, which he had built himself.

His parents both died within two years of each other and as a 19 year-old he inherited 75 per cent of his father’s multi-million dollar fortune, which included the increasing amounts of cash flow generated from oil drilling royalties

Upon his arrival in Hollywood, he was dismissed by insiders as a rich man’s son, but went onto win an Academy Award for Best Director of a Comedy Picture for Two Arabian Nights in 1928.

In 1930, he went onto make the most expensive movie ever made by spending a then-unheard-of $3.8 million of his own money to make Hell's Angels , an epic flying film that ultimately became a box office hit after overcoming many production obstacles.

While flying an experimental US Army spy plane in 1946, he was almost killed when he crashed into a Beverly Hills neighbourhood and suffered multiple broken bones and third degree burns from an exploded fuel tank.

In 1953 he stipulated that all profits from his aerospace and defense contractor, Hughes Aircraft Company, should be used to fund the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland, thereby turning it into a tax-exempt charity and America’s second largest private foundation.

By the late 1950s, he vanished from public life with rumours circulating about obsessive, compulsive behaviour in his reclusive private life.

As resourceful as ever, Mr Hughes came up with the idea of living in hotels, after he discovered that by never remaining in one state for more than 180 days he could avoid declaring residential status and was exempt from paying income tax.

Aware of his eccentric public image, he once quipped: “I'm not a paranoid deranged millionaire. Goddamit, I'm a billionaire.”

In 2004 Howard Hughes’ life was recounted in a five-Oscar winning film directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes. Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert said after seeing The Aviator , “What a sad man. What brief glory.”