Venerated, detested and controversial to the last: US film director Elia Kazan dies at 94

There are those who can never forgive Elia Kazan, one of the towering figures of 20th-century American film and theatre, for naming names before the House Un-American Activities Committee at the height of the McCarthy era in 1952.

But as tributes flowed in yesterday, following his death at the age of 94, the director who discovered Marlon Brando and James Dean and showcased the best of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams at last achieved a kind of peace.

Actors and colleagues hailed him as one of the seminal figures in American drama, a director who could bring the most intense passions out of his actors - he was a co-founder of the Actors Studio. He was also remembered as someone who could make intense social dramas, among them East of Eden, A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, positively sizzle on the screen.

Warren Beatty, who starred in the 1961 Kazan movie Splendour in the Grass, said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times: "Elia Kazan was my first teacher in movies, an indispensable mentor for me; inspiring, generous, unpretentious, pre-eminent in both the theatre and the movies. I am blessed to have had him as a friend."

Karl Malden, who starred in On the Waterfront among other Kazan productions, said: "I lost a dear friend. I think he was one of the best directors I've ever worked with." It was Malden who, in 1999, inadvertently stirred up the old controversy about Kazan's anti-Communist testimony by nominating the director for an honorary lifetime achievement award at the Oscars. The subsequent appearance of the wiry old man on the stage in the embrace of Martin Scorsese provoked a collective shudder of embarrassment from the audience, many of whom refused to stand or clap.

Yesterday, Kazan's critics were largely silent following his death in New York on Sunday. Kazan never apologised for his testimony, in which he denounced eight actors and writers, including the playwright Clifford Odets and the actress Paula Strasberg, as members of the Communist Party. In fact, he took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times justifying his act.

Kazan, who was born in Constantinople in 1909 and moved to New York at the age of four, spent much of his early life fascinated by the social and political possibilities of artistic performance. After a period as an actor in the 1930s, he established himself as an electrifying director.

His first directing Oscar was for Gentleman's Agreement (1947), and he continued to garner awards by the fistful, right up to his last film, The Last Tycoon, in 1976.