Michael Winner, bon viveur, restaurant critic and arguably one of the best known British film-makers of the 20th century has died at the age of 77. "A light has gone out of my life," his wife Geraldine Lynton-Edwards said. "Michael was a wonderful man, brilliant, funny and generous."

Winner had been in ill health for a number of years and almost died after contracting a bacterial infection while holidaying on Barbados in January 2007.

Born to a wealthy family in north London, Winner cut his teeth at the BBC before making his debut as a writer-director with the 1960 crime thriller Shoot to Kill. His freewheeling 1964 sex comedy The System established him as a key chronicler of swinging 60s London and gave rise to a fruitful collaboration with the hell-raising actor Oliver Reed. Winner went on to work with Reed again on The Jokers, I'll Never Forget What's'isname and the 1968 wartime saga Hannibal Brooks.

Yet Winner's greatest success came in the US, when he took the reins of the 1974 vigilante drama Death Wish from original director Sidney Lumet. Death Wish, starring Charles Bronson as a mild-mannered architect turned gun-toting angel of vengeance, bloomed into one of the year's biggest box-office hits and went on to spawn two sequels. Winner's other American films include Lawman, The Mechanic, The Big Sleep and Scorpio. He also worked with a wild-eyed Marlon Brando on The Nightcomers, an overheated prequel to the Henry James story The Turn of the Screw.

During his heyday, Winner took pride in making violent, simple, populist pictures that irked the critics and appeared to relish his role as a man who called the shots. "A team effort is a lot of people doing what I say," he once remarked. His career waned in the 90s and he bowed out with the 1999 hitman caper Parting Shots, a British film that reunited him with his old friend Oliver Reed. In later life he found a fresh lease of life as an outspoken restaurant critic for the Sunday Times. His insurance commercials for British television also established a catchphrase – "Calm down, dear" – that was later adopted by David Cameron.

Winner was reportedly offered an OBE in 2006 but turned it down with a lordly flourish. "An OBE is what you get if you clean the toilets well at King's Cross station," he said.