British screenwriter and director Jimmy Sangster has died, aged 83.

Best known for his work for Hammer Film Productions, Sangster wrote the scripts for X: The Unknown, The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula and many other horror classics. He also directed The Horror of Frankenstein, Lust for a Vampire and Fear in the Night, although he admitted that directing was not his forte.

Sangster worked on numerous American TV shows, penning scripts for many of the popular genre shows in the 1970s including Wonder Woman and The Six Million Dollar Man, as well as detective series such as Cannon, Ironside and McCloud.

At a retrospective of his work held three years ago at the National Film Theatre, Sangster passed on sound advice to would-be writers and directors: “The important thing about a script is to tell the story. There are three acts: one, two, three. You set it all up in the first act, you mix it all up in the second act, and then you finish. And you tell the story… The most important thing about a script is the construction. If you’ve got the right construction, it’s difficult to mess up. If you’ve got the wrong construction, it doesn’t matter what you do, you can’t do anything to remedy it.”