Director John Singleton, who made one of Hollywood’s most memorable debuts with the Oscar-nominated Boyz N the Hood and continued over the following decades to probe the lives of black communities in his native Los Angeles and beyond, has died. He was 51.

Singleton’s family said on Monday that he died in Los Angeles, surrounded by family and friends, after being taken off life support. Earlier this month, the director suffered a major stroke.

Singleton was in his early 20s, just out of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, when he wrote, directed and produced Boyz N the Hood. Based on Singleton’s upbringing and shot in his old neighborhood, the low-budget production starred Cuba Gooding Jr. and Ice Cube and centered on three friends in South Central Los Angeles, where college aspirations competed with the pressures of gang life.

For many, the 1991 release captured the explosive mood in Los Angeles in the months following the videotaped police beating of Rodney King. Boyz N the Hood also came out at a time when, thanks to the efforts to Spike Lee and others, black films were starting to get made by Hollywood after a long absence.

Singleton became the first black director to receive an Academy Award nomination, an honor he would say was compensation for the academy’s snubbing Lee and Do the Right Thing two years earlier, and was nominated for best screenplay. At 24, he was also the youngest director nominee in Oscar history.

“I think I was living this film before I ever thought about making it,” Singleton told Vice in 2016. “As I started to think about what I wanted to do with my life, and cinema became an option, it was just natural that this was probably gonna be my first film. In fact, when I applied to USC film school they had a thing that asked you to write three ideas for films. And one of them was called Summer of ’84, which was about growing up in South Central LA.”

Singleton’s death on Monday followed a turbulent week during which his family members made opposing court filings regarding his health. Singleton had been in intensive care in a Los Angeles hospital since he had a stroke on April 17. A court filing last week by his mother, Shelia Ward, requested she be appointed Singleton’s temporary conservator to make medical and financial decisions while he was incapacitated.

Ward’s filing said that Singleton was in a coma. But on Friday, Singleton’s daughter Cleopatra Singleton, 19, filed a declaration disputing that account. She maintained that her father was not in a coma and that doctors did not “have a concrete diagnosis.” She opposed her grandmother becoming conservator, or guardian.

Singleton’s passing prompted widespread praise for a filmmaker who, as his Shaft star Samuel L. Jackson said, “blazed the trail for many young film makers,” while “always remaining true to who he was and where he came from.”

Ava DuVernay called him “a giant among us.” Spike Lee said, “We’ll miss you but your films will live on.” Jordan Peele, the Oscar-winning Get Out and Us filmmaker, called him “a brave artist and a true inspiration.”None of Singleton’s subsequent movies received the acclaim of Boyz N the Hood and he was criticized at times for turning characters into mouthpieces for political and social messages. But he attracted talent ranging from Tupac Shakur to Don Cheadle and explored themes of creative expression , identity and the country’s racist past, notably in Rosewood, based on a murderous white rampage against a black community in Florida in 1923.

He also made the coming-of-age story Baby Boy, a remake of the action film Shaft and an installment in the Fast and Furious franchise, 2 Fast 2 Furious. More recent projects included the FX crime drama Snowfall, which he helped create. Starring Damson Idris, Snowfall returned Singleton to the Los Angeles of his youth and the destructive effects of the rise of crack cocaine.

“Drugs devastated a generation. It gave me something to write about, but I had to survive it first,” Singleton told the Guardian in 2017. “It made me a very angry young man. I didn’t understand why I was so angry, but I wasn’t someone who took my anger and applied it inward. I turned it into being a storyteller. I was on a kamikaze mission to really tell stories from my perspective an authentic black perspective.”

Singleton was married twice, and had five children. Besides his career in movies, Singleton also directed the memorable, Egyptian-themed video for Michael Jackson’s “Remember the Time,” which included Eddie Murphy and Magic Johnson. He cast hip-hop artists and other musicians in many of his films, including Ice Cube in Boyz N the Hood, Janet Jackson and Shakur in Poetic Justice and Tyrese Gibson in Baby Boy.