Ray Harryhausen died aged 92

Visual effects master Ray Harryhausen, whose stop-motion wizardry graced such films as Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans, has died aged 92.

The American made his models by hand and painstakingly shot them frame by frame to create some of the best-known animated sequences in cinema. His death in London was confirmed to the BBC by a family representative.  "Harryhausen's genius was in being able to bring his models alive," said an official statement from his foundation.

Born in Los Angeles in June 1920, Raymond Frederick Harryhausen had a passion for dinosaurs as a child that led him to make his own versions of prehistoric creatures. Films like 1925's The Lost World and the 1933 version of King Kong stoked that passion and prompted him to seek out a meeting with Willis O'Brien, a pioneer in the field of model animation.

During World War II Harryhausen joined director Frank Capra's film unit, which made the Why We Fight series to back the US war effort. After the war, he made stop-motion versions of fairy tales that prompted his idol, O'Brien, to hire him to help create the ape in Mighty Joe Young - an achievement that won an Academy Award.

In 1992 he was given a special Oscar to honour his work with special effects in the days before computer-generated imagery. Harryhausen lived in the UK for several decades with his wife Diana and often appeared at fantasy conventions. He died at London's Hammersmith Hospital, having received treatment for about a week.