LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Actor George C. Scott, famed for powerful, driven performances and for refusing his profession's highest honor -- a best-actor Oscar -- for his role as Gen. George Patton, has died at age 71, a coroner's spokesman said Thursday.

Scott, who died at his home in Westlake Village, 40 miles west of Los Angeles, won the Oscar for the 1970 film about the heroics of the American general during World War II.

A spokesman for the Ventura County Coroner's office said a full statement giving the cause of death would be issued later Thursday. But Scott had been dogged by ill health in recent years and it was believed he died of natural causes.

When he was named best actor for ``Patton'' at the 1971 Oscars ceremony, Scott was at home in his New York state farm watching ice hockey. He described the ceremony as a ``meat parade'' and condemned the Oscars in general as ``offensive, barbarous and innately corrupt.''

Despite his recent ill health, Scott had still been working frequently. He was last on the big screen earlier this year in director Sidney Lumet's remake of ``Gloria.''

Among his recent TV projects were the remakes of ``Inherit the Wind,'' which screened in May this year, and ``12 Angry Men,'' for which he won an Emmy Award last year.

Daily Variety gossip columnist Army Archerd reported earlier this year that Scott was working on his memoirs.

Born George Campbell Scott in Wise, Va., on Oct. 18, 1927, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps after graduating from high school in 1945 for a four-year stint.

In 1950 he briefly studied journalism at the University of Missouri until, as he put it, he realized ``acting paid much better.''

But his acting career started out slowly and stormily. For seven years he toured with small theatrical companies, and during this time he went through two failed marriages, to Carolyn Hughes and Patricia Reed, more bar brawls than he cared to remember and five broken noses.

He made his film debut in 1959, starring in ``The Hanging Tree,'' and followed that up as a ferocious prosecutor with ''Anatomy of a Murder'' that same year.

Scott received Academy Award nominations for best supporting actor in 1962 for ``The Hustler,'' and for best actor in 1972 for ``The Hospital.''

A year after refusing his ``Patton'' Oscar, Scott won an Emmy for Arthur Miller's ``The Price'' and refused that as well, saying he did not feel it was right to compete with other actors.

Later, however, he told a close friend, director Arthur Hiller, that if he ever won another Oscar he would accept it just to avoid the fuss of not doing so.

``He probably doesn't realize it, but I think if George C. Scott had his way, he'd like to be the world's greatest character actor and have nobody know him,'' Hiller wrote in his book, ``Close-Ups.''

Film critic David Thomson, in his book, ``Biographical Dictionary of Film'' said that at one time Scott seemed like ''the great threat in American acting -- he had such drive and bite, such timing and authority.''

He is also remembered for playing another high-ranking officer, Gen. Buck Turgidson, in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 spoof, ''Dr Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.''

Scott was married five times, twice to actress Colleen Dewhurst, with whom he had two of his six children. The couple married in 1960 and divorced five years later only to remarry in 1967. The second marriage ended in divorce five years later.