Hollywood film industry lobbyist Jack Valenti died last night aged 85.
Mr Valenti is credited with developing the US movie rating system. He served as a key aide to President Lyndon Johnson before heading the Motion Picture Association of America as the movie industry's primary lobbyist for 38 years.
He suffered a stroke in March 2007, shortly before he was to begin promoting his memoir, This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House, and Hollywood, and died of complications from that stroke in his Washington, D.C., home.
When he took over as president of the Motion Picture Association of America, Valenti was caught between Hollywood's outdated system of self-censorship and the liberal cultural explosion taking place in America.
He abolished the industry's restrictive Hays code, which prohibited explicit violence and frank treatment of sex, and in 1968 oversaw creation of today's letter-based ratings system.
"While I believe that every director . . . studio has the right to make the movies they want to make, everybody else has a right not to watch it," Valenti said shortly before his retirement in 2004.