Corman, known as the "King of the Bs" in Hollywood, died Thursday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif., his wife and children said.

"When asked how he wanted to be remembered, he said, 'I was a filmmaker, nothing more, nothing less,'" they said in a statement.

In 2009, Corman received an honorary Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Starting in 1955, Corman helped produce and direct hundreds of films, including "Black Scorpion," "Bucket of Blood" and "Bloody Mama," and was a notable talent scout: He hired aspiring filmmakers Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, James Cameron and Martin Scorsese and gave early breaks to actors who became some of Hollywood's biggest names.

Jack Nicholson made his film debut as the title character in Corman's 1958 "The Cry Baby Killer."

Other actors who got their start in Corman films include Robert De Niro, Bruce Dern and Ellen Burstyn.

Peter Fonda's performance in "The Wild Angels" led to his starring role in the landmark biker film "Easy Rider," with Nicholson and Dennis Hopper, another Corman alumnus.

"Boxcar Bertha," starring Barbara Hershey and David Carradine, was an early film by Martin Scorsese.

Ron Howard, who would go on to win a best-director Oscar for "A Beautiful Mind," worked with Corman on the 1977 film "Grand Theft Auto."

Corman's filmmakers were given minuscule budgets and often had to finish their movies in as little as five days.

Corman's films were often ahead of their time, dealing with such then-taboo subjects as sex and drug use, such as his 1967 release "The Trip," an explicit LSD story written by Nicholson and starring Fonda and Hopper.

He also distributed prestigious foreign films in the United States, including Ingmar Bergman's "Cries and Whispers," Federico Fellini's "Amarcord" and Volker Schlondorff's "The Tin Drum." The latter two won Oscars for best foreign-language film.

Roger William Corman was born in Detroit and raised in Beverly Hills, but "not in the fancy part," as he once put it.

He attended Stanford University, earning a degree in engineering, and came to Hollywood after three years in the Navy.

Corman started out as a clerk at 20th Century-Fox, eventually becoming a story analyst.

After briefly leaving the business to study English literature at Oxford, he returned to Hollywood, where he worked as a television stage manager and literary agent before embarking on his career as a producer-director.

He was married to Julie Halloran, also a producer, and they had four children.

Despite his penny-pinching ways, Corman maintained good relationships with his filmmakers, boasting that he had never fired one because "I didn't want to inflict that humiliation."

Some of his former underlings returned the favor years later. Coppola cast him in "The Godfather, Part II," Jonathan Demme put him in "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Philadelphia," and Howard gave him a role in "Apollo 13."

Most of Corman's films were quickly forgotten by the public, but a notable exception was 1960's "Little Shop of Horrors," about a bloodthirsty plant that feeds on humans and featured Nicholson as a masochistic dental patient.

In 1963, Corman began a series of films based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, the most notable of which was "The Raven," which teamed Nicholson with veteran horror stars Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone.

Corman's success led to offers from major studios, and he directed "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre" and "Von Richthofen and Brown" with normal budgets, but both films were disappointments.

Read Also: Morreu ex-namorada de Avicii. Tinha 34 anos (Portuguese version)