His greatest achievement as a director was the 1982 epic Gandhi, which collected eight Oscars.
Later in his acting life he starred in Jurassic Park in 1993, as the park's billionaire creator John Hammond.
Born in Cambridge in 1923, he started acting at the age of just 12, making his professional stage debut aged 18.
He was appointed a CBE in 1967 and knighted nine years later in 1976, before being made a life peer in 1993.
He married his wife, actress Sheila Sim, in 1945. His son Michael was born in 1949, followed by two daughters, Jane and Charlotte.
Michael is a theatre director and former artistic director of the Almeida Theatre in Islington, north London, and Charlotte is an actress.
His family faced tragedy in 2004 when his elder daughter Jane Holland, her daughter, Lucy, and her mother-in-law, also named Jane, were killed in the south Asian tsunami on Boxing Day.