Greek film director Theo Angelopoulos dies at 76

AFP - Greece's award-winning film director Theo Angelopoulos died on Tuesday after being hit by a motorcycle while crossing a street, a hospital official said. He was 76.

Angelopoulos died of cerebral haemorrhage at a hospital near the coastal city Piraeus, where he was transferred following the accident.

Angelopoulos became an emblematic figure of Greek cinema beginning in the 1970s. His "Eternity and a Day" won the coveted Palme d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1998.

He directed more than a dozen films, most of them examining society in contemporary Greece.

"He was admitted to an intensive care unit suffering from serious head injuries, internal bleeding and several fractures," said George Georgiades, head of the intensive care unit at the private hospital where Angelopoulos was taken.

The filmmaker suffered heart failure while in the hospital and eventually succumbed to his injuries, he told AFP.

A police source said the director had been working on a new film at the time of the accident.

"We are all in mourning for this great director, who has honoured his homeland with his work," government spokesman Pantelis Kapsis said minutes after the news of his death.

Born on April 27, 1935 Angelopoulos studied law and had first wanted to become a writer or a poet.

Among his films are "Megalexandros" which received the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1980 and "Ulysses' Gaze" which received the Grand Jury prize at Cannes in 1995.

He was a central figure of Greece's "New cinema" of the 1970s.