Famed director dies

NEW YORK (AP):

Mel Stuart, an award-winning documentarian who also directed Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, has died. He was 83.

His daughter, Madeline Stuart, said her father died last Thursday night of cancer at his home in Los Angeles.

Stuart's documentaries include The Making of the President 1960, for which he won an Emmy, as well as subsequent explorations of the 1964 and '68 campaigns.

Other programmes were The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and the Oscar-nominated Four Days in November.

His groundbreaking 1973 film Wattstax focused on the Wattstax music festival of the previous year and Los Angeles' Watts community in the aftermath of the 1965 riots.

But while Stuart's documentaries won acclaim and cemented his reputation, he won a special sort of following with the 1971 musical fantasy Willy Wonka.

That film was his response to a young reader of the Roald Dahl children's classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Stuart's daughter Madeline asked her dad to make a movie of the book she loved. The movie soon became an enduring family favourite.

A collaborator on "Willy Wonka" was screenwriter David Seltzer, who at 26 had received his first job in the film business - making documentaries - from Stuart and calls him "a mentor by way of drill sergeant, much-feared boss and much-loved friend."

A New York native, Stuart attended New York University, where he set aside his early aspirations to be a composer in favour of a career in film-making.