American director Paul Wendkos, whose career spanned 50 years and about 100 films and television shows, has died at the age of 84.

Probably best known for the 1959 movie Gidget, starring Sandra Dee as a surfer girl, Wendkos died Thursday in Malibu, Calif., of a lung infection following a stroke.

His other films included the 1957 drama The Burglar, his first feature film starring Jayne Mansfield, and 1969's Guns of the Magnificent Seven.

He directed the television miniseries The Legend of Lizzie Borden, starring Elizabeth Montgomery, and A Woman Called Moses with Cicely Tyson, and episodes of the TV series The Rifleman and Hawaii Five-O.

Wendkos was born in Philadelphia in 1925 and served in the U.S. navy during the Second World War.

He attended Columbia University and later studied film history and aesthetics at The New School for Social Research.

His first movie was the documentary Dark Interlude that looked at rehabilitating the blind.

He is survived by his wife Lin Bolen, a former NBC television producer, his son Jordan, a granddaughter, a niece and nephews.

With files from The Associated Press