Los Angeles  - Robert Mulligan, the director of the movie classic To Kill a Mockingbird which brought the issue of entrenched racism in the US South to the screen, has died aged 83.

Mulligan died Friday of heart disease at his Connecticut home, according to an announcement by his family Monday.

Though he never won an Oscar himself, he directed five different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Gregory Peck and Mary Badham in Mockingbird, Natalie Wood in Love with the Proper Stranger, Ruth Gordon in Inside Daisy Clover and Ellen Burstyn in Same Time, Next Year.

Mulligan was born August 23, 1925, in New York and worked briefly on the copy desk of The New York Times before starting his show business career as a messenger boy at CBS.

He soon became a director of live television shows before moving to film.

The classic 1962 adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird was named the No. 25 film of all time by the American Film Institute. Both Peck, who played Atticus Finch, the lawyer and father in the film about racial injustice, and Badham, who played his daughter, are deceased.

Harper Lee, 82, who wrote the book on which the movie was based, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom of the United States for her contribution to literature in
2007. (dpa)