John Singleton, maker of ‘Boyz N the Hood’, dies at 51

Director John Singleton, who made one of Hollywood’s most memorable debuts with the Oscar-nominated Boyz N the Hood and continued over the following decades to probe the lives of black communities, has died. He was 51.

Singleton’s family said on Monday he died in Los Angeles, surrounded by family and friends, after being taken off life support. Earlier this month, the director suffered a major stroke.

Singleton was in his early 20s, just out of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, when he wrote, directed and produced Boyz N the Hood. Based on his upbringing and shot in his old neighbourhood, the low-budget production starred Cuba Gooding Jnr and Ice Cube and focused on three friends in South Central Los Angeles, where college aspirations competed with the pressures of gang life. Boyz N the Hood was a critical and commercial hit, given a 20-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival and praised as a groundbreaking extension of rap to the big screen, a realistic and compassionate take on race, class, peer pressure and family. Singleton would later call it a “rap album on film”.

For many, the 1991 release captured the explosive mood in Los Angeles in the months following the videotaped police beating of Rodney King. It also came out at a time when, thanks to the efforts to Spike Lee and others, black films were starting to get made by Hollywood after a long absence.

Singleton became the first black director – and at 24 the youngest – to receive an Academy Award nomination, an honour he would say was compensation for the academy’s snubbing Lee’s classic Do the Right Thing two years earlier, and was nominated for best screenplay.

“I think I was living this film before I ever thought about making it,” Singleton said in 2016.