The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Saturday December 6 2003
There was no sex scene in the film Blow Up between Varuschka von Lehndorff and the character played by Hemmings, as incorrectly stated in our report below.

David Hemmings, the boyish, tousle-haired actor who became a 60s icon on the strength of one memorable film, has died on set in Romania at the peak of his acting comeback.

Jowly and brilliant as a louche old geezer in recent work, he flabbergasted his original fans when he re-emerged in 2000, after 20 years of directing, as the corpulent major-domo of the Roman games in the blockbuster Gladiator.

He speculated in interviews at the time that he would be forgotten again by the time he reached 70 - "If I live that long." He was 62 when he suffered a fatal heart attack while making a new film, Samantha's Child. British and Romanian paramedics struggled to revive him but failed.

Hemmings burst on to the 60s scene as a photographer in Blow Up, Michelangelo Antonioni's take on "swinging London" which precisely caught the mood of its release year, 1966. The part was loosely based on David Bailey, the photographer associated with the likes of Twiggy and the model Jean Shrimpton.

He was new to national attention and vastly in demand, but his fine performance was actually the result of a long pedigree. In recent years, Hemmings enjoyed pointing out that Blow Up was his 48th film. A talented choirboy treble, he first appeared at the age of 12 in the forgotten Five Clues to Fortune, or The Treasure of Woburn Abbey.

Hemmings' third wife, Lucy Williams, was with him when he died, and although two previous marriages ended in divorce, he was famously popular with, and fond of, women. He had a rueful edge to his natural pride when a cruder age voted his Blow Up cavortings with the model Varuschka the hottest sex scene ever, five months ago.

Hemmings was born in Guildford, the son of a biscuit salesman who encouraged his singing talent. He appeared as a treble with the English Opera Group but he quit to enrol at Epsom school of art. He was a talented painter and staged his first exhibition at 15.

Repeated requests to take film parts lured him back to acting, and after Blow Up they multiplied. He appeared in Barbarella, Camelot and the Charge of the Light Brigade and married the American actress Gayle Hunnicutt. But in the early 1970s he turned to directing, making the well-regarded Running Scared and Just A Gigolo which starred David Bowie. When the great cry of astonishment went up over his return as Cassius in Gladiator, he quipped: "People thought I was dead but I was just directing The A Team."

Hemmings' agent, Liz Nelson, said: "He had just finished his final shots on Wednesday and was going back to his dressing room when he suffered the heart attack."