Film fans have woken up this morning to the sad new that Tony Scott has passed away from an apparent suicide - he was sixty eight years old.
The English filmmaker enjoyed a career that spanned over forty years and saw him deliver some of cinema's best and most loved movies.
Scott kicked off his directing career in commercials and it was 1983 and a movie called The Hunger when he made his feature film directorial debut.
It may have been a British horror movie with a first time director but that did not stop the likes of Susan Sarandon, David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve taking on the project.
The movie gained a cult following and Scott was up and running as a filmmaker - but it was to be with his next project that he really made his mark.
And that project was a little known movie called Top Gun, which starred Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards and Kelly McGillis.
The film was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson and followed students of an elite US Flying school as they competed with each other to be the best.
The movie was a box office smash when it was released and went on to become the highest grossing movie of that year.
Top Gun remains one of the most popular movies that Scott ever directed and is a film that has endured over the years.
He followed up Top Gun with the likes of Beverly Hills Cop II, Days of Thunder and The Last Boy Scout.
He brought a Quentin Tarantino script to life in 1993 in the form of True Romance as Christian Slater teamed up wit Patricia Arquette and Dennis Hopper.
He saw out the nineties with Crimson Tide, The Fan and Enemy of the State as he well and truly cemented himself as an action movie filmmaker.
The noughties saw him return with Spy Game as he teamed up with Brad Pitt and Robert Redford before going on to work with Denzel Washington in Man on Fire.
He would team up with Washington on three more occasions as they worked together on Deja Vu, The Taking of Pelham 123 and Unstoppable.
Unstoppable was the final Tony Scott movie to hit the big screen back in 2010 as Chris Pine teamed up with Washington.
The high speed thriller saw Washington and Pine play two men who try to stop an unmanned freight train from crashing in a city.
Earlier this year there had been talk of a second Top Gun movie. Scott has also served as producer on upcoming movies such as Stoker, Out of the Furnace and TV series Labyrinth.
On the 19th August Scott jumped from the Vincent Thomas Bridge in Los Angeles. He is survived by his wife and two sons.
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw
Tagged in Tom Cruise Denzel Washington Tony Scott Top Gun