A noted American film director, producer and writer who touched generations with much-loved movies such as ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and ‘All the President’s Men’, Alan J. Pakula left Hollywood a poorer place with his death on 19 November, 1998, aged 70.

He earned a series of Academy Award nominations during a career which spanned more than 40 years and altogether directed eight different actors in Oscar-nominated performances, including Jane Fonda and Liza Minnelli.

Arguably one of the best directors of the 1970s, Mr Pakula’s films captured the dark, paranoid mood of America in the post-Vietnam, Watergate era. His ‘conspiracy flicks’, particularly ‘All the President’s Men’ and ‘Sophie’s Choice’, continue to influence and inspire film-makers all over the globe today.

“If you’re going to make a film,” he once famously commented, “you have to try to make sure it comes out of a childlike passion, as if you’re doing it for the first time.”

The son of Polish immigrants, Alan Jay Pakula was born on 7 April, 1928, in New York, USA. He was educated at Yale University where he majored in drama and dabbled in theatre, before embarking on his Hollywood career as an assistant in the cartoon department at Warner Brothers.

It was not until 1957, however, that Mr Pakula made his mark on the industry when his father agreed to underwrite his first movie, ‘Fear Strikes Out’. With it, he also began his long-time association as a producer with director Robert Mulligan .

Mr Pakula’s first production role, ‘Fear Strikes Out’ told the true story of a major league baseball player who suffers a nervous breakdown and earned Robert Mulligan an Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures award at the 1958 DGA Awards.

The unforgettable and multiple award-winning ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ soon followed in 1962, again in partnership with Mr Mulligan. Easily Mr Pakula's greatest producing accomplishment, the film later ranked number 2 on the American Film Institute’s 2006 list of 100 Most Inspiring Movies of All Time and saw him pick up his first Best Picture Oscar nomination a year later. He would subsequently go on to produce a further five pictures with Mr Mulligan before eventually making his directorial debut with the hit ‘The Sterile Cuckoo’, or ‘Pookie’ as it was known in the UK.

By now emerging as the foremost director of the ‘thinking man’s thriller’, the 1970s signalled the advent of Mr Pakula’s so-called ‘paranoia trilogy’. A series of conspiracy thrillers, ‘Klute’, ‘The Parallax View’ and ‘All the President’s Men’ all scored highly at the box office and are today considered to be some of the best films of the decade.

He scored further hits during the 80s with his critically-acclaimed adaptation of the harrowing ‘Sophie’s Choice’ and courtroom dramas such as ‘Presumed Innocent’ and ‘The Pelican Brief’.

His final film, ‘The Devil’s Own’, hit screens in 1997 to a lukewarm reception.

Perhaps a true measure of his immense influence amidst the industry, he was elected president of the jury at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival.

Meryl Streep reportedly begged Mr Pakula for her role in ‘Sophie’s Choice’, a performance which later saw her win, amongst many other awards, an Oscar and a Golden Globe for Best Actress.

Altogether, he won three Oscars, as well as an impressive further six wins and 10 nominations elsewhere.

He was killed on 19 November, 1998, aged 70, during a freak car accident on the Long Island Expressway in New York in which a metal pipe flew through the windshield of his vehicle and struck him in the head.

His work, even today, continues to inspire new generations and, as Robert Redford once put it, succeeds where many others have failed in bringing “sensitivity and intellect to seemingly intractable subjects.”