Stanley Kubrick, the director of 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, has died at the age of 70, police in Hertfordshire said yesterday.

They said they had been notified of the death at about 1 p.m. by a doctor who had been called to Kubrick's home in St Albans, north of London. They did not know the cause of death, but said there were no suspicious circumstances. A spokesman said the police had been contacted "as a matter of routine".

Born in New York in 1928, the son of a successful Jewish doctor, Kubrick was never short of money. When his father gave him a Graflex camera as a birthday present, he took to eavesdropping on New York life with the camera concealed in a paper bag.

He belonged to the last wave of film-makers to achieve prominence before film school became the principal means of entering the industry. His films were almost invariably adapted from novels, though he displayed a particular interest in themes relating to human fallibility and the impossibility of imposing rational systems on an irrational universe.

Along the way he drove innumerable collaborators to distraction. The distinguished French film-maker Bertrand Tavernier resigned as publicist for A Clockwork Orange with a cable sent to Kubrick c/o Warner Brothers in Hollywood, reading: "I resign, stop. As a film-maker you are a genius, but as an employer you are an imbecile."

He also became a recluse, retiring to a manor in the English countryside and retreating behind thick clouds of rumour and myth.

From Paths of Glory (1958), a pacifist tract banned for many years in France, every Kubrick film has been an event.

In 1960 Kirk Douglas, having had a dispute with Anthony Mann, called in Kubrick to rescue the multi-million-dollar epic Spartacus under the impression that Kubrick would be his contented servant. Kubrick instead flexed his muscles, hiring and firing actors as he saw fit.

With Lolita (1962), Kubrick took on Nabokov's sulphurous novel on under-age sex, and in 1964 called on Peter Sellers for the brilliant Dr Strangelove, a comedy about nuclear annihilation. With 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), he produced cinema's hymn to the space age, but in 1971 came back to earth with A Clockwork Orange, a screen adaptation of Anthony Burgess's dystopian novel which incurred the wrath of Britain's self-appointed moral watchdogs and which he then withdrew from circulation.

By now seclusion was setting in seriously, and Kubrick made only four films in the next 27 years, starting with the underrated Barry Lyndon (1975).

In 1974 he said he was settling permanently in England, though it was rumoured he was continuing to keep American time, sleeping during the day and working at night. He refused to give interviews, and his isolation was so complete that in 1996 an English fraudster successfully impersonated him for several months.

In 1996, after almost a decade without a film release, he embarked on the romantic comedy Eyes Wide Shut with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, devoting more than a year to filming after replacing a leading actor in a change which required several million dollars worth of re-shooting.

Kubrick found the time for three marriages, the third of his wives offering the opinion: "Stanley would be happy with eight tape recorders and one pair of pants."