Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, regarded as one of the most influential filmmakers of modern times, has died in Rome at the age of 94.
He died at his home on Monday evening with his wife Enrica Fico at his side, sources close to the family said.
The director suffered a near-fatal stroke in 1985 which left him partially paralysed and unable to speak.
With films like L'Avventura (The Adventure) and Blowup, Antonioni invented a unique cinematic language that defied plot-driven narrative and dialogue, inspiring generations of directors the world over.
Antonioni's funeral will take place in his birthplace of Ferrara on Wednesday.
Italy's 'poet of alienation' was born in Ferrara in northeast Italy on September 29, 1912.
Raised in a comfortable, middle-class environment, Michelangelo was sent off to study business economics at the University of Bologna.
But his real interests lay with the arts and, in 1939, he enrolled at Rome's Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, a film school that shaped an entire generation of post-war Italian filmmakers.
After working as a scriptwriter and trying his hand at documentaries, he made his first feature, the film noir Cronaca di un Amore (Story of a Love Affair) in 1950.
Critics would later recognize the movie as showing much of the director's signature style but it was ignored by the public and film experts alike when released.
His breakthrough movie L'Avventura arrived in 1960 when he was 46. The first of a projected trilogy, it clinched the Special Jury Prize at Cannes.
Elements that could be detected in his previous works had crystallised into his highly-recognisable style, taking the cinema world by surprise.
L'Avventura and the subsequent works in the trio, La Notte (The Night) in 1961 and Eclisse (Eclipse) in 1962, are harsh, enigmatic reflections on the difficulties of 'connecting' in a brusque, fast-paced, technological world.
Imbued with a deep sense of desolation and alienation, the films are populated with bourgeois characters who appear to have lost their sense of self, their values and their ability to communicate in the modern era.
The 1966 film Blowup (1966), a thriller based on the camera's eye and set in the heart of swinging London, earned perhaps the broadest audience of any of the director's films.
Starring David Hemmings as a successful but desensitised-to-life fashion photographer, the film explores concepts of reality while retaining Antonioni's trademark themes of alienation and angst. An imaginary tennis game at the film's end symbolising the thin line between reality and illusion became one of the defining moments of 1960s cinema.
Antonioni went to the United States to shoot his next movie, Zabriskie Point (1970) a portrait of American society and consumerism-run-amok. Some $7 million was poured into the film, an extravagant sum for the time.
The result was a colossal flop that dealt a crippling blow to the 59-year-old director's artistic reputation and was followed by a long absence from filmmaking.
Antonioni returned in 1975 with Professione: Reporter (The Passenger) in which Jack Nicholson plays a burnt-out reporter. Although it was received more favourably than Zabriskie Point, Antonioni's output from this point on was to remain infrequent.
He made two more films - Il Mistero di Oberwald (The Oberwald Mystery, 1979) and Identificazione di Una Donna (Identification of a Woman, 1982) before suffering a stroke on December 20, 1985.
The stroke left the director partially paralysed and he never regained his speech, relying on his wife Enrica Fico, whom he married in 1986, to communicate verbally for him.
But his physical disabilities did not stop him from working and in 1995, at the age of 83 and after an absence of 13 years, he made a comeback with the movie Al di la' delle Nuvole (Beyond the Clouds).
While critics and audiences were divided in their response to the movie, it was nonetheless viewed as a testament to the auteur's determination to continue working.
In the same year, 1995, Antonioni received a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars, travelling to Los Angeles in person to receive his statuette.
In 2004, after a lull of nine years, he returned to the screens with Eros, an erotic drama in three segments, one shot in digital by the Italian maestro, another by Hong Kong's acclaimed art-house director Wong Kar-Wai and the third by America's Oscar-winning Steven Soderbergh.
The eagerness of younger-generation, big-name directors to work with Antonioni was evidence of his revered status in the industry.
Cult German director Wim Wenders credited Antonioni, whom he once described as "the screen s greatest painter", with inspiring him to take up directing.
American directing great Martin Scorsese was another admirer influenced by Antonioni's groundbreaking style. When Antonioni was awarded his career Oscar in 1995, Scorsese hailed him as "one of the greatest artists of the 20th century".
