Blake Edwards, the film director who brought old-school slapstick into the modern movie era with the “Pink Panther’’ series and who turned a tart novel about a Manhattan call girl into the elegant screen classic “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,’’ died at 88 yesterday at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif.
The cause was complications of pneumonia; Mr. Edwards’s wife, actress Julie Andrews, and his children were at his side.

During four decades as a director, Mr. Edwards established a freewheeling filmography notable as much for the acrid cynicism underneath the laughs as for the laughs themselves. In effect, he gave the physical comedy of the silent era and the character-based humor of Hollywood forebears such as Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder a modern, neurotic spin. Late in life, especially, Mr. Edwards channeled his discontents with the film industry and his own life into hilarious cinema. His “S.O.B.’’ (1981) may be the most bitingly funny poison-pen letter to Hollywood ever made.

If Mr. Edwards specialized in comedy, he could also make stark dramas, like 1962’s “Days of Wine and Roses,’’ an uncompromising tale of alcoholism. The director had big hits — “Tiffany’s’’ (1961), “The Pink Panther’’ (1963), the midlife crisis comedy “10’’ (1979), the gender-bending farce “Victor/Victoria’’ (1982) — but he also presided over some of the more notorious bombs of his era, and he almost killed his wife’s career with their first two films together, “Darling Lili’’ (1970) and “The Tamarind Seed’’ (1974).

Mr. Edwards found success in radio, television, and even on stage, with the successful 1995 Broadway adaptation of “Victor/Victoria.’’ The movies, however, were where he made his mark. The “Panther’’ series, starring Peter Sellers’s bumbling Inspector Clouseau, became a personal franchise for the director, established with the first film and “A Shot in the Dark’’ in the early 1960s, arguably peaking with 1975’s “The Return of the Pink Panther’’ (“Do you ’ave a lee-sance for your minkey?’’).

Mr. Edwards also worked multiple times with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis; and the director’s relationship with composer Henry Mancini extended over three decades and resulted in 12 Oscar nominations for music and four wins, including for “Moon River’’ in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.’’

The considerable pain in Mr. Edwards’s personal life took some time to surface in his films. Born William Blake Crump in Tulsa in 1922, he was abandoned by his father at an early age. His mother relocated to Los Angeles and married Jack McEdwards, a Hollywood assistant director. The young Blake escaped into movie theaters and the world of slapstick pioneers such as Laurel and Hardy and Buster Keaton.

Serving in the Coast Guard during World War II, he took a drunken dive into a shallow swimming pool and spent five months in an LA naval hospital with a broken neck. Even when he was in traction, comedy wasn’t far away: Mr. Edwards woke up one day to find Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the sitting president, at his bedside, asking in what battle he’d been wounded