FILM director Stanley Kubrick, who made 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and Full Metal Jacket, died yesterday at his home in Hertfordshire where he led a reclusive life. He was 70.

In a mirror image of his hatred of the spotlight, Kubrick's family simply announced his death and said there would be no further comment.

The invisible director, who assiduously shunned talking to the press or giving interviews, shut the doors of his Hertfordshire country house some years ago and rarely came out in public again. Compared with Kubrick, Howard Hughes was a party animal.

Malcolm McDowell, who worked with him on A Clockwork Orange, probably came closest to the truth about Kubrick when he said: ''He was one of the greats, yes . . . but what stops him from being a genius is his lack of humanity.''

Film critic Barry Norman said last night that Kubrick was an ''extraordinary'' film-maker. ''I knew him a little. I was always trying to persuade him to come on television to talk to me, but he always said he was awful on television and would never do it.

''He made some very remarkable movies. He was a very reclusive man and refused to fly. That's why his films were made in Britain - even Full Metal Jacket, set in Vietnam, was filmed in this country. He was a great Anglophile and lived here since the 1960s.

''I think he was very prickly about criticism, but was appreciative of people who liked his movies. Very few people knew Mr Kubrick well. He kept very much to himself.''

Born in the Bronx in 1928, he was encouraged by his father, a doctor, to take up photography as a hobby. By 17, he was a staff photographer on the New York-based Look magazine.

He quit in 1950 to try his hand at making documentaries and sold his first short film, Day of the Fight, to RKO-Pathe for $100.

In 1953, Kubrick made his first feature film, a low-budget job called Fear and Desire which he wrote, directed, filmed, and edited with money borrowed from friends and relatives. He repeated his one-man performance for his second feature, the pulp fiction thriller Killer's Kiss.

After making The Killing, a bigger budget movie which was reckoned to be the inspiration for Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, he shot the anti-war Paths of Glory and established himself as one of the most promising Hollywood film-makers of his generation.

His next break came in 1960, when he was asked to replace Anthony Mann as director of the blockbuster, Spartacus. However, he chose to desert Hollywood and move to England in the hope that he would gain greater independence and creative control of his movies.

He made only two more films in the 1960s, both of them in Britain. They were Dr Strangelove (1964) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), still the definitive sci-fi movie. In 1971, he reworked Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, which was mercilessly criticised for its violence.

The futuristic story about a sex-crazed society caused a dilemma for Kubrick himself. In an unheard of move, Kubrick insisted the film be withdrawn after expressing concern that it caused anti-social behaviour.

His next film, Barry Lyndon, in 1975 was followed up by an adaptation of Stephen King's horror novel, The Shining, in 1978. His last film to be screened was Full Metal Jacket in 1987.

Terrified of flying, he finally settled in England in 1979 and bought an old manor house in 172 acres in the exclusive estate of Childwickbury, near St Albans, Hertfordshire, with his third wife, Christiane.

For the final year of his life he worked, almost unnoticed, on Eyes Wide Shut, an erotic thriller, at London's Pinewood Studios. It is scheduled for release in July.

He is survived by his wife and three daughters.