David Jones, 74; director's influence spanned Atlantic

Actors Margaret Colin and Derek Cecil posed with director David Jones (right) for a production of Tennessee Williams's ''Sweet Bird of Youth,'' at Williams College in Williamstown. (William Moore for the Boston Globe/file 2006)

NEW YORK - David Jones, a cerebral and versatile British-born director who worked on projects as esoteric as the neglected plays of Maxim Gorky, as admired as the films "84 Charing Cross Road" and "Betrayal," and as widely seen as television's "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit," died Sept. 18 in Rockport, Maine.

He was 74 and lived in New York City and Rockport, having moved to the United States two decades ago. The cause was a heart attack, said Joyce Tenneson, his companion for the last 19 years.

As a stage director in England, Mr. Jones was prolific, working with both classical and contemporary texts and guiding dozens of productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he was hired in the early 1960s by the artistic director, Peter Hall.

As an associate artistic director, Mr. Jones was given credit for resurrecting the reputation of Gorky, the early-20th-century Russian playwright, whose skills as a dramatist had been largely subsumed by his revolutionary politics.

In the 1970s Mr. Jones directed four Gorky plays: "Enemies" - with a remarkable cast that included Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley, Patrick Stewart, and John Wood - as well as "The Lower Depths," "Summerfolk," and "The Zykovs," all at Aldwych Theater, the Royal Shakespeare Company's London home. In 1990, he added a fifth Gorky work, "Barbarians."

In addition, Mr. Jones brought lesser-known works of Anton Chekhov, Bertolt Brecht, Sean O'Casey, and Harley Granville-Barker to Royal Shakespeare's audiences.

"He was underestimated in his own country," the playwright Hugh Whitemore ("Breaking the Code"), said in a phone interview Monday. "His RSC work in the 1970s was colossal."

Mr. Jones was indeed an unsung member of the theatrical generation in Britain that included the writers Harold Pinter, Simon Gray, and Whitemore, and such actors as Stewart, Kingsley, and Mirren, many of whom had extended artistic partnerships with him.

Mr. Jones's films brought him greater renown. Released in 1987, "84 Charing Cross Road," with a screenplay by Whitemore, was an adaptation of the memoir of an American book lover, Helene Hanff (played by Anne Bancroft), about her correspondence and friendship with a London bookseller (Anthony Hopkins).

"Betrayal" was Mr. Jones's film adaptation of Pinter's reverse-chronology play about an adulterous affair; the movie, with an Oscar-nominated screenplay by Pinter, starred Kingsley as the cuckolded husband, Jeremy Irons, and Patricia Hodge.

Mr. Jones also directed two of Pinter's works on Broadway, "No Man's Land," with Christopher Plummer and Jason Robards Jr., in 1994, and "The Caretaker," with Stewart, in 2003.

Known among his circle as cultured and curious, modest and civil, Mr. Jones had a deep voice and a quietly commanding presence on any set.

"As a director he was patriarchal without the pomposity that normally accompanies patriarchy," Kingsley said by phone Monday. "He never infantilized the actor. We were always equal with him, which in a theater director especially is very rare."

David Hugh Jones (he sometimes used his full name professionally) was born in Poole, Dorset, on the south coast of England. His mother was a mathematician; his father was a minister. He studied English at Cambridge, where he absorbed the respect-for-text discipline espoused by F.R. Leavis, a critical giant of the time.

His marriage to Sheila Allen, an actress, ended in divorce. In addition to Tenneson, a photographer, Mr. Jones leaves a sister, Gwyneth of Somerset, England, and two sons, Jesse of Brooklyn, N.Y., and Joseph of Tucson.

Mr. Jones came to prominence as a theater director in America in 1980, when he became artistic director of a classical repertory company established by the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It was an unusual undertaking, the creation of an American acting company by an English director, and it was, to judge from critical response to its productions, a semisuccess.

Mr. Jones subsequently taught at the Yale School of Drama and continued to direct films, including "Jacknife" (1989), starring Robert De Niro as a troubled Vietnam veteran; and "The Confession," a 1999 legal thriller with Kingsley, Amy Irving, and Alec Baldwin.

In recent years much of Mr. Jones's work had been on series television, directing episodes of "The Practice" and "Chicago Hope," among others.

When they were working together on "84 Charing Cross Road," Whitemore said, Mr. Jones "took the most enormous pains with every detail of the script and the set and the performances." But it wasn't that he was fastidious.

"That's not the proper word," Whitemore said. "He just wanted things to be right. He took the same pains when he was making himself a martini."