Stanley Donen, who directed or codirected some of Hollywood’s best-known movie musicals, including “On the Town,” “Royal Wedding” and what many consider the greatest movie musical of all time, “Singin’ in the Rain,” has died. He was 94.

Donen, a master of filming dance with imagination and style and a director whose nonmusical credits include “Charade,” “Indiscreet” and “Two for the Road,” died of an apparent heart attack Thursday, his sons Joshua and Mark Donen confirmed Saturday.

A one-time Broadway chorus boy whose film career was launched in the 1940s, Donen’s name was inextricably linked with MGM and its athletic dancing star Gene Kelly.

At age 19, he assisted Kelly on the dance numbers for the 1944 movie musical “Cover Girl,” for which Donen conceived and directed (uncredited) the “Alter Ego” double-exposure number in which Kelly danced with his window reflection after it leapt off the windowpane.

A year later, Donen came up with the equally innovative idea of having Kelly dance with Jerry, MGM’s cartoon mouse, in director George Sidney’s 1945 musical “Anchors Aweigh.”

“I get all the credit for this, but it would have been impossible for me to do without Stanley,” Kelly told Donen biographer Stephen M. Silverman. Donen, Kelly said, “worked with the cameramen and called the shots in all these intricate timings and movements.”

At just 25, Donen made his directorial debut with “On the Town.”

Co-directed by Kelly, the 1949 musical memorably left the confines of the studio for its spectacular opening number, “New York, New York.” It was shot on location in New York City as three sailors — Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin — set out on a 24-hour leave in the Big Apple.

In general, Donen once explained, Kelly “was responsible for most of the dance movements (in the film). I was behind the camera in the dramatic and musical sequences.”

Donen made his solo directing debut with “Royal Wedding,” a 1951 musical in which Fred Astaire famously danced up the walls and across the ceiling — a breathtaking effect created by attaching the camera to the base of a large revolving steel-reinforced cylindrical chamber containing the hotel-room set.

More than three decades later, Donen directed a similar gravity-defying number for the music video of Lionel Richie’s hit “Dancing on the Ceiling.”

Among Donen’s other movie musicals: “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” (1954), “Funny Face” (1957), “The Pajama Game” (1957, co-directed by George Abbott) and “Damn Yankees” (1958, codirected by Abbott).