Richard Donner, master of macho blockbusters with a human touch

Superman, Lethal Weapon, The Omen, Scrooged - the movie director's CV tracked Hollywood's most bankable genres from the 80s onwards

Richard Donner was the classic studio director and an action blockbuster maestro, the Michael Curtiz of the VHS age; he was the great inventor, or reinventor, of so many Hollywood genres and styles. When Hollywood invented the franchise property", Donner was at the centre of things. His macho Lethal Weapon movies with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover were far from enlightened on sexual politics. But they gave a black man equal billing with a white man in a top-flight Hollywood movie: rare in 1987 and rare even now.

Related: Richard Donner, director of Superman and The Goonies, dies aged 91