The scene is set, and we zoom in on a palatial mansion in Bel Air, Los Angeles's glamour capital. It's the largest house on the block and we pan across its sprawling grounds and spectacular 123 rooms - past the gym, swimming pool and tennis court; over the sports bar and four garages; through two gift-wrapping rooms, the bowling alley, and the doll museum - until we come to the grief-stricken family gathered inside. In the main bedroom, a lavish boudoir the size of a basketball court, a tragedy is unfolding. A rich, eccentric TV producer breathes his last within the silk-swathed confines of his bed. His weeping wife and son are by his side, but there's a gap in this touching tableau where their high-profile actress daughter should be. She has cut herself off from the family since she suspected her mother was having an affair. The next couple of months will see accusations fly between mother and daughter and a battle over a will that threatens to tear this Hollywood dynasty apart...

The wealth, the glamour, the feuding - it could have been a scene from one of his many shows. But it seems the truth is stranger than fiction - although Aaron Spelling, the elfin TV producer whose work attracted as many critics as it did cult followers, will never see how this particular story plays out.

Despite the real-life saga sparked by Spelling's death in June this year following a stroke, it's his glitzy on-screen tales for which he'll be best remembered. From the cool cops of Starsky And Hutch to the hot chicks of Charlie's Angels and the big-haired bitches of Dynasty, his soaps were mega-hits the world over, earning him the title "prince of prime time" and making him a multimillionaire in the process. But, behind the scenes, he was a man of contradictions. The hot-shot executive whose shows were set in the world's most exotic locations yet who refused to fly; who lived in LA's largest house yet never lost touch with his audience; the awkward Jewish kid who went on to become a decorated World War II veteran, some-time actor and star of his own rags-to-riches transformation.

Born in Dallas, Texas, on April 22, 1923, he was the fifth child of Polish/Russian Jewish immigrants Pearl Wald and David Spurling. (Spurling was simplified to Spelling by a confused immigration official. ) The family lived in a tiny $6000 house in one of the city's slums. His father, a tailor, never made more than $45 a week, and the Spellings struggled to get by. Food was scarce - Aaron's task was to buy stale bread and cakes on sale from the local bakery - and the young boy fantasised about a fabulous life elsewhere. "If you lived in a little house with wall-to-wall people on a road that was never paved, you dream about beautiful people, beautiful clothes, and beautiful styles of living, " he wrote in his 1996 autobiography, Aaron Spelling: A Prime-Time Life.

Jewish people were not a common sight in Dallas and Aaron was bullied every day. "I grew up thinking 'Jew boy' was one word, " he recalled. He would make himself ill so he wouldn't have to walk to school and, when he was eight years old, he suffered a ner-vous breakdown. "I went to bed thoroughly depressed, and couldn't find the energy to get up. I didn't go back to school for a year. "

It was during this time that Spelling's love of storytelling was born. He immersed himself in the works of O. Henry and Mark Twain, and went to the movies with his mother. When he finally returned to school, he had found "a new weapon to combat the bullies" - he would tell them a story, promising to finish it the next day, his first practical experience of a serial format.

He joined the armed forces at 18, working as a war correspondent for the US military newspaper Stars And Stripes, rec-eiving a Purple Heart medal for bravery after being wounded by a sniper's bullet in Germany. While on service back home, he had another close shave. Sick with flu, he was pulled off a domestic flight by a doctor just two minutes before take-off. On arriving at his house, Spelling learnt that everyone on the flight had been killed, and his horrified mother, who'd believed her son dead, made him promise never to fly again - an oath he kept to his dying day.

After the army, he completed a Bachelor of Arts at Southern Methodist University in Texas, where he discovered a talent for writing, directing and acting, winning an award for playwriting in 1947. Tired of parochial Dallas, Spelling headed to LA in 1953, in search of theatrical work. But it was a tough scene to crack, and he entered the lowest period of his life, so broke he once scooped up copies of the Los Angeles Times from people's driveways and sold them back to a newsstand to make money for food.

Slowly, Spelling worked his way from ticket seller to band boy to talent spotter to amateur theatre director, before being offered a minor role in the popular TV cop series Dragnet. He picked up more parts in shows like Gunsmoke and I Love Lucy - although with his slight build, protruding eyes and the strange haircut he'd keep all his life, he was inevitably cast as "weirdos". While acting paid the bills, Spelling's career didn't take off like that of then-girlfriend Carolyn Jones, who'd later become famous as Morticia in The Addams Family. Spelling married Carolyn in 1953, but soon found himself returning to what he knew best, bashing out scripts on his typewriter at night. Finally, his big break came when one of his scripts was accepted for a weekly drama show. Spelling was soon writing for the Western series Zane Grey, making the transition to producing with his first TV series, Johnny Ringo, in 1959.

By 1963, Spelling had his first smash-hit, Burke's Law, but his success came at the expense of his relationship. Working long hours, Spelling never saw Carolyn, and the pair divorced in 1964, by which time the producer was already into what he termed his "mad playboy era". His love life even inspired one LA columnist to write a regular feature about him called "Aaron's Girl of the Week".

For a self-confessed funny-looking guy, the bug-eyed bachelor did surprisingly well in the romance stakes, partying with starlets and dating a score of different women, including Mary Ann Mobley, 1959's Miss America. But it would be an 18-year-old graduate from Beverly Hills High School who finally tamed him.
When Spelling met Carol "Candy" Marer, she was known as "the body" among her fellow students, but as well as her looks, he loved the fact that she wasn't an actress. They married in 1968; he was 45 and she 23. He credited Candy with giving him the courage to follow his dreams, claiming, "Without her, I'd still be working for somebody. She's a cute, ditzy little blonde, but she's my real strength. " The pair had two children, Victoria "Tori" Davey, in 1973, and, Randall "Randy" Gene, in 1978. Spelling made sure his kids enjoyed all the luxuries he'd missed out on in his youth, even trucking in snow so they could enjoy a white Christmas.

Spelling soared from hit to hit, with cop shows like 1968's The Mod Squad and 1975's Starsky And Hutch. A year later came Charlie's Angels, one of his greatest triumphs. Watched by more than 50 million Americans and shown in over 90 countries, it made stars of its original cast, Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith and Farrah Fawcett. Panned as "jiggle TV" because of its numerous swimsuit scenes, the series ran until 1981 and, with two spin-off films, the rest is history.

During this time, Spelling made a remark that would come to haunt him, describing his shows as "cotton candy for the mind". Despite later serious work such as 1993's AIDS story And The Band Played On, he was known as "the Cotton Candy King of TV" for the rest of his life. However, the tiny producer had the Midas touch, earning his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1978. But of all his productions, Spelling joked that his LA home was "easily the biggest and most talked about". In 1983, he and Candy bought Bing Crosby's old house for $10 million, tore it down and rebuilt it. The construction took five years and cost $12 million. Nicknamed "Candy Castle", it was the largest single-family dwelling in LA, with Spelling complaining, "I'm still trying to find the bathroom. "

Rather than becoming the scene of endless parties, it remained Spelling's private haven, where he'd venture out only to talk to the tourists who'd visit the house, asking them in his softly spoken manner what sort of television they liked watching. It was this common touch that his colleagues admired so much. Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom and US network CBS, remembered: "For a person of such fame, you would marvel at how unassuming, kind and gentle he was. "

In contrast to his own generous personality, it was the venal side of people's nature that Spelling revealed in the most lavish of all his shows and the pinnacle of his career: the 1980s hit Dynasty. The series, which turned its star, Joan Collins, from B-grade actress into super-bitch legend, became the most widely watched in TV history, pushing soap operas into prime-time schedules for the first time.

When the ABC network, once dubbed "Aaron's Broadcasting Company", cancelled Dynasty in 1989, Spelling had no show on the air for the first time since 1960. "Spelling's Dynasty Over, " declared critics, and he noted that "they didn't mean the series". He was destroyed: "I was so depressed, I would have quit, but I like TV too much. " But the following year, he proved his detractors wrong. Tapping into the world of his own children and their friends, Spelling, now in his 60s, devised Beverly Hills, 90210, which launched the Fox network into the big time. After the teen angst of Beverly Hills came the grown-up wranglings of Melrose Place - and Heather Locklear, the '90s answer to Joan Collins.

The producer was sensitive to the constant knocks from critics, but quipped that "you have a choice of proving yourself to 300 critics or 30 million fans". With hits like 7th Heaven, Summerland and Charmed to follow, Spelling proved himself to the latter, winning the Lifetime Achievement Award at the People's Choice Awards in 1992, and earning a place in the Guinness World Records as the most prolific producer in TV history, with more than 5000 hours of programs over 40 years.

Spelling was the epitome of a Hollywood mogul, complete with pipe - a habit he'd adopted early on after seeing photos of pipe-smoking big-shots - and he remained a driven workaholic, fuelled by his fear of poverty. Behind the scenes, things weren't so rosy. In 2001, Spelling was diagnosed with oral cancer and underwent radiation therapy that year for a lesion in his throat (respiratory problems would continue to plague him). It wasn't his only problem - at 82, he was accused of sexual harassment by his former nurse, whom he and Candy countersued for $5 million.

Yet it was his wife and daughter who brought Spelling the most scandal in later years. Their relationship is famously troubled, with Tori accusing Candy of having an affair with family friend and ex-con Mark Nathanson who, ironically, introduced Spelling to Candy in the first place. With the release of Tori's show, So NoTORIous, a spoof of her own life in which her mother is portrayed as a vapid shopaholic, the feud escalated to the point where Tori wouldn't go home unless Candy was out, something she recently lamented: "I lost the last nine months with my dad because of the circumstances with my mum. "

Struggling with Alzheimer's and growing frailer, Spelling died at his home on June 23, with Candy and Randy at his bedside. He was 83 years old. Joan Collins speculated, "His official cause of death was dementia, Alzheimer's and respiratory problems, but maybe a broken heart also contributed. "

Director Joel Schumacher, a close friend of Spelling's, commented, "Aaron knows we like to watch rich people fight with each other. " His words have become sadly prophetic as the battle between Spelling's wife and daughter seems to have overshadowed his passing, with 33-year-old Tori saying she only found out he had died via an email from a friend. Now, in a denouement worthy of Dynasty itself, it looks like Tori will be contesting her father's will for his $500 million estate.

Spelling once joked, "My epitaph will be: 'Tori Spelling's father. Did 90210 and Melrose Place, lived in a big house. '" But, like his plots, there was a lot more to him than that.