Frank Capra Jr, film producer, was born on March 20, 1934. He died of prostate cancer on December 19, 2007, aged 73

Frank Capra Jr followed his father into the film business, working his way up from an assistant director to a producer on several of the Planet of the Apes films and latterly head of the Screen Gems studios in North Carolina, home to the hit TV series Dawson's Creek (1998-2003).

Capra was born in Los Angeles in 1934, at a time when his father was already well on the way to establishing himself as one of Hollywood's top directors. Capra Jr's first visit to a film set was to see his father at work on It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Film was not his original choice of career, however. He studied geology, directed several technical films and latterly army training films, before working as an assistant director on television and for his father on the Bette Davis comedy Pocketful of Miracles (1961).

He joined forces with the legendary showman Arthur P. Jacobs at Apjac Productions, serving as a producer on Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) and Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam (1972), but Jacobs's refusal to credit him on screen as anything other than “associate producer” led to an acrimonious split.

Capra subsequently worked as an independent producer in Hollywood and had a spell as head of Avco Embassy Pictures. He visited North Carolina in the mid-1980s for a film of Stephen King's Firestarter, and returned a decade later to become president of the Screen Gems studios at Wilmington, one of the largest US studios outside California.

Tokuzo Tanaka, film director, was born on September 15, 1920. He died on December 20, 2007, aged 87

Tokuzo Tanaka was a Japanese film director whose craft and professionalism were typical of a generation of filmmakers trained in the traditional studio system. This functioned by apprenticing younger staff to senior artists. Tanaka was fortunate in that his mentors included two of Japan's most famous directors, Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi.

Born in Osaka, Tanaka graduated from Kwansei Gakuin University in that city. In 1948 he entered the Daiei Motion Picture Company as an assistant, in which capacity he served on Kurosawa's Rashomon, a murder story told from multiple viewpoints that became one of the first Japanese films widely distributed abroad. Subsequently, Tanaka assisted Mizoguchi on his twin masterpieces of period drama Ugetsu Monogatari and Sansho the Bailiff.

Tanaka became a director in his own right with the 1958 Bakeneko goyo da. This was at a time when Daiei was beginning to specialise in a brand of action-filled period drama known as chanbara. Tanaka became one of the studio's genre specialists.

During the Sixties Daiei produced several noteworthy series of films depicting Japanese folk heroes, and the studio's contract directors alternated between them. Tanaka took charge of some of the finest instalments in the Zatoichi series, where his flair for choreographing action and photographing landscape was strikingly apparent. He also directed several notable entries in the Hoodlum Soldier (Heitai yakuza) series; these essayed a satiric re-examination of the Japanese wartime experience.

Daiei's bankruptcy in 1971 led Tanaka to move into television, and he continued to direct proficiently in that medium, but he maintained his links with the film industry until his death.