Los Angeles - Film director Kenn Annakin, who helmed nearly 50 movies in Britain and Hollywood during a 50-year career, died this week in Hollywood at age 94, according to a family announcement Thursday. Annakin died Tuesday.

His most famous movies include the family classic Swiss Family Robinson, the war epics The Longest Day and The Battle of the Bulge, and the madcap comedy Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, for which he was nominated for a best-screenplay Oscar.

Born in 1914 in Yorkshire, England, Annakin got his start in the film industry during World War II as a camera operator in the Royal Air Force.

He made his feature directorial debut in 1947 and moved to Los Angeles in 1979. His other movies include The Biggest Bundle of Them All, Paper Tiger, The Call of the Wild, The Fifth Musketeer and The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking.

"He was a wonderful director who directed all kinds of different, wonderful pictures," longtime friend James MacArthur, one of the stars of Swiss Family Robinson, told the Los Angeles Times.

As a director Annakin "was a general, which a director has to be, but he was a man of great intelligence and a very warm soul. But he knew what he wanted, and he was going to get it." (dpa)