In 2004, he received an Honorary Academy Award in recognition of his writing, directing and producing an extraordinary body of work for the screen.

McEdward was the son of J. Gordon Edwards, a director of silent movies, and in 1925, he moved the family to Los Angeles and became a film production manager.

[6] In an interview with The Village Voice in 1971, Blake Edwards said that he had "always felt alienated, estranged from my own father, Jack McEdward".

[7] After graduating from Beverly Hills High School in the class of Winter 1941, Blake began taking jobs as an actor during World War II.

[7]Edwards served in the United States Coast Guard during World War II, where he suffered a severe back injury, which left him in pain for years afterwards.

Edwards also created, wrote, and directed the 1958–61 TV detective series Peter Gunn, which starred Craig Stevens, with music by Henry Mancini.

The following year, Edwards produced Mr. Lucky, an adventure series on CBS starring John Vivyan and Ross Martin.

[6] Days of Wine And Roses, a dark psychological film about the effects of alcoholism on a previously happy marriage, starred Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick.

[6] According to critic George Morris, Darling Lili "synthesizes every major Edwards theme: the disappearance of gallantry and honor, the tension between appearances and reality and the emotional, spiritual, moral, and psychological disorder" in such a world.

Edwards used complex cinematography techniques, including long-shot zooms, tracking, and focus distortion, to great effect.

[citation needed] Edwards also directed most of the comedy film series The Pink Panther, the majority of installments starring Peter Sellers as the inept Inspector Clouseau.

Having grown up in Hollywood, the stepson of a studio production manager and stepgrandson of a silent-film director, Edwards had watched the films of the great silent-era comedians, including Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Laurel and Hardy.

The film has always had a cult following, and some critics and fans have considered it a "masterpiece in this vein" of silent comedy, though it did include minimal dialogue.

[16] On December 15, 2010, Edwards died of complications of pneumonia at the Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California.

Edwards' movies are slick and glossy, but their shiny surfaces reflect all too accurately the disposable values of contemporary life.

British film critic Peter Lloyd, for example, described Edwards, in 1971, as "the finest director working in the American commercial cinema at the present time".

Edwards's biographers, William Luhr and Peter Lehman,[17] in an interview in 1974, called him "the finest American director working at this time".

[18] They refer especially to the Pink Panther's Clouseau, developed with the comedic skills of Peter Sellers as a character "perfectly consistent" with his "absurdist view of the world, because he has no faith in anything and constantly adapts".

When the octogenarian director entered and dusted himself off as if he had crashed, he told presenter Jim Carrey, 'Don't touch my Oscar.