"Fast & Furious 7" for Universal and also was starring in the upcoming "Brick Mansions" and "Hours."

Paul Walker, best known for his role in the hit Fast and the Furious movies, died Saturday afternoon in a car accident in Valencia, Calif., The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. He was 40.

The L.A. County Sheriff's Department said that the crash happened around 3:30 p.m. in the 28300 block of Rye Canyon Loop. "When they arrived, deputies found the vehicle engulfed in flames," a statement read. "The Los Angeles County Fire Department responded, extinguished the fire and subsequently located two victims inside the vehicle. The victims were pronounced dead at the scene."
As of 8 p.m., the road was still closed, and two Los Angeles local TV stations had sent news vans to the scene.
Walker was in what police described as a 2005 Porsche Carrera GT when the single-car accident happened. The car reportedly burst into flames, with one of Walker's friends telling the local newspaper they "went through fire extinguishers" in a futile bid to fight the blaze. "We tried, we tried," Antonio Holmes told

PHOTOS: Paul Walker's Career in Pictures

Walker was in the area, just north of Los Angeles, for a car show and toy drive set up through his charity, Reach Out WorldWide. In 2010, he flew to Chile to help those injured in the 8.8 magnitude earthquake and earlier was involved in the effort to assist survivors of the earthquake in Haiti.
He is survived by his 15-year-old daughter, Meadow.
Walker was reprising his role as Brian O'Conner in Universal's Fast & Furious 7 for director James Wan. The movie had recently begun filming in Atlanta and was set to move to Abu Dhabi in January, but was on a break from shooting for the Thanksgiving holiday. The seventh film in the blockbuster action franchise has been slotted to hit theaters July 11.
The blue-eyed Walker, who described himself on his Twitter page as an "adrenaline junkie," did many stunts in the Fast and Furious movies himself. He starred in a 2010 National Geographic Channel series Expedition Great White, on which he spent 11 days as part of a crew that caught and tagged great white sharks off the coast of Mexico. His hobbies included riflery and archery.
Wan was working with Walker on Fast and Furious 7; the actor had already completed work on what looks likely to be his final films, a Hurricane Katrina drama called Hours, and a thriller called Brick Mansions. In the latter he plays an undercover cop, just as in the initial The Fast and the Furious his character, Brian O'Connor, was part of an undercover LAPD operation to infiltrate a street racing circuit. The film ended with O'Connor transferring his loyalties to the apparent criminals.