Ted Demme, who has died aged 37 after a heart attack, emerged from the shadow of his uncle, the Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme, to become one of the most forceful independent filmmakers in the United States.
The pair had worked on the hugely successful music video, Streets Of Philadelphia, with Bruce Springsteen, whose song featured in Jonathan's film, Philadelphia (1993). This collaboration, and another on the television series Tales From The Underground (1997), evoked claims of nepotism, but Ted observed that everything he did cinematically had a route back to Jonathan, "my best friend and big brother".
However, Ted achieved commercial success in his own right with the comedy Life (1999), and won critical acclaim for the biopic, Blow (2001), starring Johnny Depp as a drug trafficker. He was also executive producer of the television movie, A Lesson Before Dying (1999), for which he and his fellow producers received an Emmy.
Born in New York, Demme achieved notoriety in his 20s with the actor-comedian Dennis Leary and their television series, Yo!MTV Raps. Among their earliest collaborations was No Cure For Cancer (1992), Leary's darkly comic musings on life, family, drugs, smoking and cancer.
Further work included the Baltimore-located cop series, Homicide: Life On The Street. The first of his six features, the dire rap comedy, Who's The Man? (1993), worked as a Hollywood calling card, and Demme moved on to the bigger budget yuppie comedy The Ref (1994), starring Leary, Judy Davis and Kevin Spacey. Audiences were uninterested, but the film got better notices from less conventional critics, who responded to its darker elements.
A third feature, Beautiful Girls (1996), rounded up a talented cast, headed by Timothy Hutton, Uma Thurman and Matt Dillon, for a wittily observant and well-acted ensemble work set in an east coast town. It remained Demme's best movie until his final work five years later.
During two years away from the big screen, Demme worked with Robert Altman on the TV series, Gun (1997), which, though critically acclaimed, failed to last a single season. The same year, he worked on Tales From The Underground and directed Leary in Lock 'N' Load. The next year, he produced John Dahl's absorbing Rounders, starring Matt Damon, and the independent drama Tumbleweeds (1999), as well as A Lesson Before Dying. His return to feature-film directing began with the Boston-set Snitch (1998), later retitled Monument Ave, again starring Leary. Characteristically, it concerned relationships and dark humour.
In 1999, Demme was offered the $75m production, Life, starring Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence as convicts forced to coexist in the climate of southern racism for 60 years. It relied heavily on the appeal of the lead actors and the feel-good ending, but audiences loved it and Demme was able to produce and direct an altogether more intriguing work, Blow.
This account of the rise of a smalltime drug pusher was an accomplished, visually ravishing work. Johnny Depp's perversely brilliant performance received - as did the film - some criticism for making the pusher attractive, but the portrait of a man annihilated by his own misdeeds showed Demme's maturity. A new thriller, Nautica, with Ewan McGregor and Heath Ledger, was in pre-production at the time of his death.
His wife, Amanda, survives him, as do their young daughter and baby son.
· Edward 'Ted' Demme, film director, born October 26 1964; died January 14 2002.