Yesterday brought the sad and perplexing news that Tony Scott, hugely successful British director of sleek, big-budget action films such as "Crimson Tide" and "Enemy of the State" had apparently taken his own life by jumping off Los Angeles' Vincent Thomas bridge.

It was a tragic end to a trailblazing career which took Scott on an amazing journey from modest, working-class beginnings in the north east of England to the Hollywood A-list.

He may never have received the recognition the Academy has bestowed upon his elder brother Ridley, but Tony wasn't out to please the critics and he didn't have aspirations to make high-art.

Instead he was a thrill-seeking adventurer who loved fast cars (he got into filmmaking upon his brothers assurance that he would be able to buy a Ferrari within a year) and embraced the American way of life and filmmaking. Scott unapologetically specialized in action movies and, within his chosen genre, he was an undeniably accomplished figure.

Perhaps surprisingly for a director so associated with Hollywood blockbusters, it was the British Film Institute which launched both Tony and Ridley Scott's filmmaking careers in the 1960s, via its production fund supporting experimental filmmaking.

The BFI provided a grant for Ridley Scott's debut short film "Boy and Bicycle," which starred a beaming 16 year-old Tony in the titular role, and subsequently helped fund the younger Scott's first directorial forays: the short films "One of the Missing" and "Loving Memory."

From these early successes, Tony went on to direct hundreds of TV commercials for his brother's production company, Ridley Scott Associates (RSA). Here he became a master craftsman, developing the heightened visual style and preoccupation with surface aesthetics that would later become the hallmark of his feature films.

Despite the film business' historic disdain for the TV advertising industry, Tony and Ridley Scott were among the first to enter the world of filmmaking after directing commercials, forging a path which would later be followed by the likes of David Fincher and Duncan Jones.

Since the mid 1980s, Tony Scott's name has been synonymous with action films; populist, high-octane adventures that found little favor with the critics but thrilled audiences and almost always delivered generous box-office returns.

Working with producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson on films such as "Top Gun," "Beverley Hills Cop II," and "Days of Thunder," Scott pioneered a new approach to the action film grounded in the glossy, heightened aesthetics and technical virtuosity of his TV commercials (a Saab advert had helped him secure the "Top Gun" job).

Bursting at the seems with the muscular ideology of the Reagan era, these films eschewed emotional and dramatic realism in favour of bravura style, bombastic characters and escapist narratives.

The approach proved box-office gold with "Top Gun" which became the highest grossing film of 1986, taking $176 million dollars, and helping Jerry Bruckheimer become one of the most successful producers of all time.

The 1990s saw Scott embrace darker territory with the Mexico-set tale of adultery and murder, "Revenge," starring Kevin Costner, and the uncharacteristic road movie "True Romance," written by Quentin Tarantino and starring Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette and Dennis Hopper.

Scott returned to big, loud, action movies with the apocalyptic submarine thriller "Crimson Tide," the first of five collaborations with actor Denzel Washington; the pair would team up again for "Man on Fire," "Deja Vu," "The Taking of Pelham 123" and "Unstoppable."

The latter, a commercial and critical success, would prove to be Tony Scott's last film, although at the time of his death the endlessly busy director reportedly had numerous projects (including a rumored sequel to "Top Gun") in development. At 68, one felt he still had several blockbusters left in him.

His profound influence is felt in the glossy action movies of contemporary directors such as Michael Bay ("Transformers") and Joe Carnahan ("The A-Team"), whose success has followed in the wake of Scott's creation of a new era-defining style of mainstream cinema.