Mel Ferrer was best known internationally as a gangling, gauntly handsome, if somewhat inexpressive leading man of Hollywood films, and for his marriage in the 1960s to Audrey Hepburn. But he had a multi-faceted career which took in writing, publishing, radio, and the Broadway stage, and he produced and directed films as well as acting in them.

At one time he looked set to be an enduring screen star but, as he was the first to admit, he was an actor of limited range and his time at the top was comparatively brief. His fortunes took a severe dip in the 1960s and 1970s when he was reduced to appearing in cheaply made Italian horror films, but he enjoyed a modest late success on American television, notably in the soap opera, Falcon Crest.

He was born Melchor Gaston Ferrer, the son of a Cuban-born surgeon and a New York socialite, in Elberon, New Jersey, in 1917. His sister, Irené Ferrer, became a distinguished cardiologist. He attended Princeton University and while still a student he gained his first stage experience at the Cape Cod Playhouse in Massachussetts. But he left to be a writer in Mexico, where he produced a bestselling children’s story, and spent six months as an editor for a publishing firm in Vermont.

Then it was back to the stage and a first appearance on Broadway as a chorus dancer in Cole Porter’s You’ll Never Know in 1938. Small parts followed before he contracted polio. After a year recovering from the disease, which left one arm partly paralysed and disqualified him from military service, he went into radio, starting as a disc jockey on local stations and rising to become a producer and director on the NBC network.

He entered films in 1944 as a dialogue director, directed Girl of the Limberlost, a low-budget remake of a sentimental family story, and assisted John Ford on The Fugitive, adapted from Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. As an actor he had his first important part in Lost Boundaries, as a New England doctor found to have negro blood. In 1950 he directed The Secret Fury, a thriller starring Claudette Colbert as a concert pianist driven to madness. Meanwhile, he had not neglected the stage, and was the co-founder with Gregory Peck and Joseph Cotten of the La Jolla Playhouse in California.

In the early 1950s he appeared in such contrasting films as Fritz Lang’s bizarre Expressionist western Rancho Notorious, the swashbuckler Scaramouche, and the musical Lili, in which he gave a memorable performance as the lame puppeteer, and he played King Arthur in Knights of the Round Table. He continued to work in the theatre, and in June 1954 he opened on Broadway in Jean Giraudoux’s Ondine, a fantasy about a prince and a water sprite.

His leading lady was Audrey Hepburn, a young British actress starting to make a name in Hollywood whom he had met at a party hosted by Gregory Peck. They were married in September 1954. It was Ferrer’s fourth marriage, including two to the same woman, Frances Pilchard. His second marriage to her had been dissolved at the end of 1953.

During 1956 he made two contrasting films on the Continent. He was Prince Andrei, with Audrey Hepburn as Natasha, in King Vidor’s sumptuous version of War and Peace, and he played opposite Ingrid Bergman in Jean Renoir’s elegant 19th-century satire Eléna et les Hommes.

He returned to Hollywood for the film of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises in 1957 and two years later he directed Hepburn in Green Mansions, an unsuccessful variant on the Shangri-la theme which made little of Hepburn’s gamine charm. But most of his film work from now on would be in Europe, partly in Hollywood epics such as The Fall of the Roman Empire, which used European locations, but increasingly in routine Italian and Spanish productions which were little seen elsewhere. Playing El Greco in a 1966 Italian film of the artist’s life, which he also produced, was a rare departure from a raft of routine shockers.

In 1967 he was back in America to produce a film version of Frederick Knott’s thriller Wait Until Dark, with Hepburn as the blind woman terrorised by criminals. But his marriage to Hepburn, already under strain, ended the following year. In 1971 he was married to Elizabeth Soukhoutine, a Belgian of Russian origin, in London.

In 1980 he seemed on the brink of realising a long-held ambition to make a film of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. He had first acquired the rights in the 1960s and had lined up Hepburn and then Mia Farrow for the title role. This time he announced plans for a musical version in which Peter, in defiance of stage tradition, would be played by a boy. But once again the project came to nothing.

An exception to a generally forgettable crop of European films was Lili Marleen (1981), a typically idiosyncratic take on the Hitler era by the leading German director Rainer Werner Fasssbinder, in which Ferrer had third billing as a man who helps Jews to escape from Nazi persecution.

He emerged from European obscurity to start virtually a new career in American television, appearing in a number of TV movies and, from 1981 to 1984, in the soap opera Falcon Crest, which charted the conflict between two families in the winegrowing area of northern California. He played Phillip Erikson, the attorney and briefly husband of Jane Wyman’s Angela Channing.

He announced his retirement from acting on his 80th birthday in 1997 and settled in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he had had a home since the 1960s.

Ferrer had a son, Sean, from his marriage to Audrey Hepburn and five children from previous marriages, the oldest of whom died as an infant. Hepburn died of cancer at 63 in 1993. His wife, Elizabeth, survives him together with his children.

Mel Ferrer, actor, producer and director, was born on August 25, 1917. He died on June 2, 2008, aged 90