The reclusive filmmaker died at his estate in Hertfordshire, England, at the age of 70, his family said.

The family refused to give the cause of death, but police who were called to the scene insisted there were "no suspicious circumstances."

"Stanley Kubrick was the grand master of filmmaking," director Steven Spielberg said last night.

"He copied no one while all of us were scrambling to imitate him."

Kubrick's last film - the psychosexual shocker "Eyes Wide Shut" with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman - is set to open July 16 and has been shrouded in mystery during its four-year production.

Warner Bros. said he had shipped a final print to New York for a screening by company brass just two weeks ago.

"He was like family to us and we are in shock and devastated," Cruise and Kidman said in a statement last night.

The legendary movie man - whose cinematic visions were compared to those of Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford - always took on projects that caused controversy, on and off the screen.

He outraged moralists with a comedy about the teen-age temptress "Lolita" (1962), spooked politicians with the Cold War satire "Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (1964) and dazzled sci-fi fans with "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968).

In 1971, Kubrick unleashed his startling vision of a British youth gone mad, "A Clockwork Orange."

With its graphic scenes of rape and torture and nudity, it earned Warner Bros. its first X rating and Kubrick withdrew it from showings in Britain - where he had lived since the 1960s - after it sparked gang violence.

He also tackled the horrors of war in "Fear and Desire" (1953), "Paths of Glory" (1957) and "Full Metal Jacket" (1987).

His other films included the Bible epic "Spartacus" (1960), the period piece "Barry Lyndon" (1975) and the Stephen King shocker "The Shining" (1978).

Kubrick, the son of a doctor, was born July 26, 1928, in The Bronx and spent almost every weekend at movie matinees.

At 17, he was hired as a staff photographer by Look magazine after editors flipped over a picture he had snapped the day President Roosevelt died. But he still dreamed about movies.

"I was aware that I didn't know anything about making films, but I believed I couldn't make them any worse than the majority of films I was seeing," Kubrick once said.

After making three documentary shorts for RKO, Kubrick produced his first feature, "Fear and Desire," but hated it so much he tried to have all prints destroyed.

He made his first big splash with "Paths of Glory" about three French soldiers accused of cowardice after a disastrous battle in World War I - a movie banned in France for many years.

Kubrick was considered a reclusive oddball, who hated flying and refused to give interviews.

But Spielberg said his reputation as an eccentric was undeserved.

"He was terribly misunderstood as a recluse just because he didn't do a lot of press. He actually communicated more than many people I know," Spielberg said.

'[And] he was more than generous when he loved someone's movie. He would pick up the phone and call a complete stranger to say how much his or her movie impressed him."

Still, "Eyes Wide Shut" seemed to confirm the world's view of Kubrick as a cinematic loose cannon.

Two of its stars - Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh - were canned during filming and one British magazine even claimed the movie had driven Kubrick off the deep end.

The flick is a thriller about two psychotherapists who are introduced into a twisted underworld of kinky sex.

Keitel was canned and replaced by Sydney Pollack after, according to the gossip mill, the star became overexcited during a sex scene with Kidman and messed her hair. The story was officially denied.

The production dragged on for a mind-boggling 19 months because of the director's insistence on up to 100 takes for scenes.

-- Bill Hoffman - 3/07/99