It is a wonder that any of Viacom's scriptwriters bother to use their imagination to devise soap opera plots when they have such an ideal source material on their doorstep.

The life of their chairman Sumner Redstone, could, without elaboration, be used as the basis for a series about wealth, family feuding and naked ambition.

Last year, the 85-year-old billionaire, whose empire includes CBS, Paramount and MTV, sought publicly to oust his daughter Shari after a simmering row about strategy. Relations were so frosty last summer that the two communicated only by fax. Shari Redstone, who heads the National Amusements cinema chain, which owns 19 Showcase cinemas in Britain, had wanted to expand the business; her father wanted to move into casinos.

Relations worsened when Shari Redstone's stepmother, Paula, a former primary schoolteacher nine years younger than her stepdaughter, raised questions about Ms Redstone's running of the business. As befits a media mogul, Mr Redstone effectively disinherited his daughter in a television interview, when he declared that she was not the heir because she wasn't up to the job.

The row between father and daughter has left much uncertainty about the future of Viacom, which Shari Redstone had long been expected to run after Mr Redstone's death. The new Mrs Redstone, whom he divorced his wife of 54 years to marry, is said to be an ally of Philippe Dauman, Viacom's chief executive, which may become more relevant as executives jostle for position in the race to take over the empire when Mr Redstone dies.

It is not only his daughter with whom Mr Redstone has trouble. His son Brent has sued him. In 2006, Mr Redstone settled a lawsuit filed by Brent Redstone, which sought to dissolve family trusts, by buying out his son's interests.

Mr Redstone has long been known as a man who runs his businesses with unchallenged authority. In 1999, at a news conference for Viacom's purchase of CBS, he interrupted Mel Karmazin, CBS's chief executive, by blurting into a microphone: “'I'm in control! Remember — I'm in control!”

Mr Redstone, a Harvard-educated lawyer, moved into business when he began working for his father's cinema chain. Having served in the Second World War, decoding Japanese messages for the US Army, he started work in the entertainment industry, believing that content, rather than distribution, was the key, coining the catchphrase: “Content is king.”

In 1987, he achieved a hostile takeover of Viacom, a media company that had syndication rights to programmes such as The Cosby Show and Roseanne. Slowly, he began to take stakes in film studios such as Paramount and Columbia, before buying the former outright.

The Viacom story could well have not happened. In 1979, Mr Redstone was trapped in a hotel fire in Boston and had to crawl on to a ledge. He underwent 30 hours of surgery and was not expected to survive.

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