Isolated by the debilitating brain-wasting disease from both his family and the nation whose faith in itself he is credited with restoring, the actor turned President died at his Bel-Air home in California from pneumonia.

His death at 93, more than 15 years after leaving the White House and after a 10-year struggle with Alzheimer's that had kept him out largely of the public eye, prompted warm tributes from world leaders.

At home, hundreds of people carrying U.S. flags and flowers made a makeshift memorial outside the Los Angeles-area funeral home where his body was being embalmed before taken to lie in state at the Reagan library.

The library sits on the crest of a California hillside not far from implanted pieces of the Berlin Wall -- which he implored Mikhail Gorbachev in a famous speech to "tear down this wall."

Reagan will be given a presidential state funeral in Washington later in the week -- the first since Lyndon Johnson's in 1973.