To get a measure of the wide range of themes and genres covered by the film director Curtis Hanson, who has died aged 71, one need only compare his greatest critical success, LA Confidential (1997), with his biggest commercial hit, 8 Mile (2002). The former is a stylish, 1950s-set noir thriller shot through with ambivalence about Hollywood, which is shown in all its dreamy allure and soul-crushing horror. The latter picture is a semi-gritty star vehicle for the rapper Eminem (AKA Marshall Mathers III) which draws on the performer’s own background in its story of a young man who uses hip-hop to escape his insalubrious trailer-park origins.

LA Confidential was acclaimed by critics who had believed they did not make them like that any more; Hanson and his co-writer, Brian Helgeland, won an Oscar for their assured adaptation of James Ellroy’s complicated novel and there was another for Kim Basinger for her comeback performance as a prostitute and Veronica Lake lookalike. Praise was slightly fainter for 8 Mile but it grossed $242m worldwide and confirmed that Hanson was both intelligent and commercial.

He had been making movies since the early 1970s but it was LA Confidential, his ninth film for cinema, which consolidated his talents and made good on his promise. As well as its precise feel for character, place and pacing, it showed him to be a warmly attentive director of actors. He helped make stars of Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce and gave Kevin Spacey one of his best roles as a narcotics detective seduced by Hollywood. Hanson refused to take any credit for the performances. “What I try to do is give each actor an environment in which they can do their best work,” he said. “Then they go off and do the mysterious thing that they do.”

He conceded, though, that LA Confidential brought him to the attention of other performers keen to vacate their comfort zones. These included Michael Douglas, whom he directed intriguingly against type as a shambolic blocked novelist in the comedy Wonder Boys (2000), and Eminem, who had never acted before (and has not, to date, acted since) but who gave under Hanson’s tutelage an affecting and low-key performance in 8 Mile that was approximately eight miles from his brash on-stage persona.

Hanson was born in Reno, Nevada, and raised in Los Angeles by his mother, Beverly, who sold property, and his father, Wilbur, a primary school teacher. He shocked his parents by dropping out of high school and announcing his ambition to become a screenwriter. He took a detour into film journalism and edited the magazine Cinema, which brought him into contact with directors he admired and allowed him to pick up tricks of the trade. He became friends with legendary directors including Don Siegel and Sam Fuller. He later collaborated with Fuller on the screenplay for that director’s last movie, White Dog (1982), an anti-racism drama about a dog trained to attack black people. Newcomer and veteran bashed out the script together in 18 days on matching typewriters in Fuller’s unheated garage.

He first began writing his own screenplays in the late 1960s. He was hired by the exploitation company AIP (American International Pictures) to write The Dunwich Horror (1970), before making his directing debut on another horror film, Sweet Kill (1972), and becoming one of four directors credited on the zombie movie Evil Town (1977). The starkest proof of Hanson’s talent was his screenplay for the neat, nasty thriller The Silent Partner (1978), about a bank clerk (Elliott Gould) who tries foolishly to profit from a robbery. Alfred Hitchcock was reported to have admired the picture.

Hanson directed the children’s martial arts adventure The Little Dragons (1979) and the good-natured coming-of-age comedy Losin’ It (1983), which starred a young Tom Cruise. He wrote Never Cry Wolf (also 1983), about a biologist in the Canadian arctic wilderness, and directed The Children of Times Square (1986), a TV movie about a runaway who turns to crime. But it was The Bedroom Window (1987), a minor Hitchcockian thriller, which began to establish him as a budding master of suspense. He stayed in that genre for Bad Influence (1990), in which a strait-laced man (James Spader) is corrupted by a stranger, played by Rob Lowe, and for The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1993), a hit thriller about a diabolical nanny (Rebecca De Mornay).

The River Wild (1994) was a fascinating attempt to put Meryl Streep, as a white-water rafter menaced by a pair of criminals, at the helm of an action movie. The film thrived on a unique exchange: the action genre benefited from an infusion of this esteemed actor’s reputation while Streep herself seemed paradoxically lightened and lifted by the chance to head up a popcorn movie, albeit one of a superior stripe. Hanson did not so much direct her as emancipate her. The pair were reunited on-screen in 2003 when they played husband and wife in Spike Jonze’s bizarre comedy Adaptation.

LA Confidential came next and marked an important turning point in Hanson’s career. “Rather than being a director for hire as I have been on most of my films, LA Confidential is that one project where I’ve been able to cash in the chips I’ve earned from being lucky enough to have had a couple of financially successful films and saying: ‘OK, now this is the film that I want to make.’ It’s my most personal movie. Whether it achieves any popular acceptance or not is less important to me. That’s not why I made it.”

Continuing his determination to explore contrasting themes and milieux, he followed Wonder Boys and 8 Mile with In Her Shoes (2005), a wise and underrated comedy-drama about two dissimilar sisters (Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette). He was disappointed to find the film dismissed in some quarters as a “chick flick”. “Movies that deal with adult emotion don’t get made today unless they can be put in that category,” he complained.

Lucky You (2007), with Eric Bana as a gambler, lacked Hanson’s usual focus and confidence. Too Big to Fail (2011) was a drama about the 2008 financial crisis made for HBO. He directed some of Chasing Mavericks (2012), the story of the surfer Jay Moriarty, but was replaced by Michael Apted due to illness; the film is credited to both men.

Hanson is survived by a son with the producer Rebecca Yeldham.

• Curtis Hanson, film director, producer and screenwriter, born 24 March 1945; died 20 September 2016