This week: a director banned by the Soviets, the man who claimed Howard Hughes inheritance, and Dolly Parton's brother

THE award-winning director Ferenc Kosa, who has died aged 81, was recognised as the best director at the 1967 Cannes film festival for Ten Thousand Days, about the travails of a Hungarian peasant family from the 1930s onward.

The film was banned for a few years by officials in communist Hungary because of its references to the 1956 anti-Soviet revolution.

Kosa co-wrote many of his scripts with the poet and author Sandor Csoori and often worked with cinematographer Sandor Sara.

Among the trio's works are Ten Thousand Days, Judgment (1970) and Snowfall (1974).

Upon Hungary's return to democracy in 1990, Kosa, who was born on November 21 1937, was a founder of the Socialist Party and a parliamentary politician from 1990 to 2006.

His death was announced by the Hungarian Academy of Arts.

MELVIN Dummar, who has died aged 74, was known for his claim that the billionaire Howard Hughes left him $156million in his will – a story told in the 1980 film Melvin and Howard. However, he died having never seen a penny of the money, which he said was left to him after he rescued Hughes on a desert road and drove him nearly three hours to Las Vegas in 1967. He lost his last legal battle ten years ago.

“I’ve been called everything from a crook to a forger,” Dummar said in 2007 in Utah, where he once owned a petrol station and later ran a business selling frozen meat, salmon and pies.

“I don’t care what people say — as long as they get the facts straight,” he said.

Jurors and judges decided he lied. A US appeals court in 2008 affirmed a Nevada state court jury’s decision 30 years earlier that found the will was a fake.

Dummar maintained that he found Hughes in late December 1967, face-down and bloody on a dirt road not far from a brothel near Lida, Nevada, and drove him nearly 190 miles to Las Vegas before giving him some pocket change and dropping him off behind the Sands Hotel.

Dummar’s story about finding an unshaved Hughes with long stringy hair and baggy clothes was as bizarre as Hughes, an aviation and movie mogul and business tycoon who spent his final years in seclusion, his hair and fingernails grown long.

“On the way to Las Vegas, he told me who he was, but I didn’t believe him,” Dummar said. “I thought he was just a bum or a prospector or something.”

Dummar said he later came to believe it was Hughes, and that about eight years later a handwritten will was delivered to his gas station in Utah.

THE musician Floyd Estel Parton, who has died aged 61, was the little brother of country singer Dolly Parton and like his sister was a country music songwriter and composer.

His most famous songs were Rockin' Years, which was recorded by his sister and Ricky Van Shelton, and Nickels And Dimes, which was also recorded by his sister and later by George Burns.

In a statement, Dolly Parton called him "our sweet baby brother". "We all sang his lovely song, Rocking Years, together as a family at the service to say goodbye to him," Parton said. "He lived a short life of love and beautiful songs."

His family will remember him as a renaissance man who enjoyed the outdoors and cooking.

He is survived by his siblings and their spouses, several nieces and nephews and great-nieces and nephews.