Robert Wise, director of Hollywood musicals like West Side Story (1961) and The Sound Of Music (1965), died at his Los Angeles home, an official of the San Sebastian Film Festival said on Thursday.

The death of Wise on Wednesday night, days after his 91st birthday, cast a pall over the festival, which was scheduled to pay a special homage to the director who also made Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and collaborated closely with late actor Orson Welles.

The official said Wise's wife Mellicent, who had been in San Sebastian to present the retrospective of his work, had left for Los Angeles.

Born in Winchester, Indiana on September 10, 1914, Wise joined the movie industry in 1933. Six years later, he became one of Hollywood's leading film editors.

He worked on Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), as well as Daniel Dieterle's The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (1939) and The Devil And Daniel Webster (1941).

West Side Story, which he co-directed with Jerome Robbins and won 11 Oscars, and The Sound Of Music were smash-hit musicals, along with the lesser-known Star! (1968).

Wise also had a penchant for war movies, and made films like The Desert Rats (1953) and The Sand Pebbles (1966), and science fiction like The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) and The Andromeda Strain (1971), before Star Trek.