While in recent years Michael Winner was best known in the UK for advertising insurance and being an outspoken restaurant critic, he was, of course, a film director. Now he has passed away at the age of 77, after having been given 18 months to live last summer, due to heart and liver complications.

Born in London in 1935, Michael Winner’s first foray into the entertainment business was a weekly entertainment column he started writing when he was just 14, which was published in over 30 local newspapers. After attending Cambridge, where he studied law and economics, Michael Winner began making documentaries and short films in the late 1950s.

He broke into the mainstream after directing Death Wish in 1974. The film is seen as a trailblazer by by some, with the Charles Bronson movie redefining the revenge flick and helping usher a new kind of single minded anti-hero onto the screen. Winner also directed the sequels Death Wish II in 1982 and Death Wish 3 in 1985.

The filmmaker also directed Charles Bronson in The Mechanic, which was remade in the 2011 action-thriller The Mechanic starring Jason Statham. He never really recaptured the success of Death Wish, although he did make the likes of a 1978 version of The Big Sleep, starring Robert Mitchum and Joan Collins, and the musical A Chorus Of Disapproval.

His last film was 1998’s Parting Shots.