This is taken from The Guardian:

David Jones
Theatre, television and film director famed for his interpretations of Gorky and Pinter
by Michael Billington
Tuesday September 23 2008

David Jones, who has died at the age of 74, was an immensely distinguished director in theatre, film and television. Although latterly based in New York, he was a pillar of the Royal Shakespeare Company in a golden decade from 1968 and had a long association with Harold Pinter that led, in 1978, to a memorable BBC Play of the Week, Langrishe, Go Down, and, in 1983, to a film of Betrayal. With his mixture of charm, articulacy and intelligence, Jones was very much an actors' director, as shown by his 2007 production of The Last Confession in Chichester and London, which yielded an unforgettable performance from David Suchet.

Jones was born in Poole, Dorset, and educated at Taunton School and Christ's College, Cambridge. He was part of the generation, including Melvyn Bragg and Humphrey Burton, that gravitated towards the BBC Television arts department in its productive heyday.

But, although always in love with the camera, Jones had strong leanings towards theatre. In May 1959 he appeared in the first London revival of Pinter's The Birthday Party at the amateur Tower Theatre in Islington. Jones, who was cast as the volatile McCann, once told me that he naively asked the author about the character's background only to be told by Pinter: "I've no crappity smacking idea. I know everything about McCann after he walks through that door - I know nothing about him on the other side." That was to be the start of a long and fruitful friendship.

Jones's professional career as a theatre director started at the Mermaid Theatre in 1961 with a typically adventurous triple bill of work by TS Eliot, WB Yeats and Samuel Beckett. But it was the RSC that was to become his natural home. He worked with Peter Brook in 1965 on a public reading of Peter Weiss's documentary-drama, The Investigation. And, on taking over the company in 1968, Trevor Nunn shrewdly put his trust in Jones and allowed him to develop into an excellent director.

Given stewardship of the Aldwych Theatre, Jones turned it into a radical powerhouse combining new work by Pinter, Edward Albee, Marguerite Duras, David Mercer and Peter Barnes with revivals of Bertolt Brecht, George Bernard Shaw, Granville Barker, Sean O'Casey and his beloved Maxim Gorky. "I aim to make this," Jones jokingly told me, "the Royal Gorky Company."

Between 1971 and 1976 he directed not just The Lower Depths, but such little-known works as Enemies, Summerfolk and The Zykovs. It was partly because Jones wanted to question Chekhov's theatrical dominance and partly because he believed the underrated Gorky offered a vivid panorama of Russian social and political life.

But, of all Jones's Gorky productions, his 1974 Enemies was the masterpiece. He was blessed with an cast including John Wood, Helen Mirren, Alan Howard, Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley. But Jones also staged the play with phenomenal flair. There was a moment when a factory-owner, shot at by strikers, was laid out on a table, thereby sending samovars and plates, flying that brilliantly captured the volatility of Russian life.

Pinter was Jones's other great passion. In 1978 he directed Pinter's adaptation of Langrishe, Go Down, based on a novel by Aidan Higgins, as a BBC2 Play of the Week. Starring Judi Dench and Jeremy Irons, it was a beautiful, lyrical film about a summer-long affair between a reticent Irish girl and a mature Bavarian student. It was also, as Jones shrewdly remarked, "a love letter to Harold's own time in Ireland". In 1973 Jones went on to make that classic film of Pinter's Betrayal, again with Irons, Kingsley and Patricia Hodge, that actually enhanced the work's painful exploration of interlocking infidelities.

On stage, Jones also directed Old Times, The Hothouse and, at New York's Roundabout Theatre, a hit version of No Man's Land, starring Jason Robards Jr and Christopher Plummer, as well as The Caretaker. With Old Times in 1985, Jones found himself directing Pinter, who had taken over the role of Deeley from Michael Gambon for an American tour. Jones recalled how Liv Ullmann, who was also in the cast, looked on in astonishment as he and Pinter would probe the author's exact intention as if he were some invisible third party. The Jones-Pinter partnership was renewed for a film version of The Trial (1993), which scrupulously located Kafka's fable in a world of quotidian reality.

Jones made several other feature films, including in 1987 a strikingly successful version of 84 Charing Cross Road, starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins.

And having worked periodically in America - including a two-year spell as director of the BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) Theater Company, where he tried to set up a permanent theatre company in Brooklyn - Jones eventually moved to the States. He worked regularly in television on prestige series such as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999), made highly praised features for Home Box Office and sporadically returned to the theatre. But he will be remembered best in Britain for his superb work at the RSC, for that influential reclamation of Gorky and for his profound understanding of Pinter.

He was divorced from the actor Sheila Allen. His partner of the last 20 years was the photographer Joyce Tenneson. From his marriage David had two sons, Jesse and Joe, and three grandchildren, whom he loved very much. Joyce's son Alex and his four children were a hugely important part of his life.

Melvyn Bragg writes: David Jones was one of the constellation of arts programme makers brought together by Huw Wheldon for BBC's Monitor programme in the late 1950s. Others included Ken Russell, Humphrey Burton, Patrick Garland and Nancy Thomas.

David's was the most elegant mind on the programme, in my view, and I observed him close-up when he followed Burton as editor and I worked directly to him. His artistic integrity was absolute. His taste seems to me to have been perfect. He worked very early on with then budding Harold Pinter, both as an actor and director, as well as bringing him into the Monitor studios for an influential interview.

He gained very rare access to EM Forster and, an even more difficult man, RS Thomas. The bleakness of Thomas's vision could seem at odds with David's ironic nature but his virtue, and singularity, was that he could, and did, yoke together such extremes.

He made a fine film with Lawrence Durrell in 1960 and Frank O'Connor in 1961 and then, forever tugged by the theatre, switched to the Berliner Ensemble as a subject. A couple of years into his editorship of Monitor, Peter Hall poached him for the RSC.

David's idea of a holiday was to direct and act in plays. His reading of great literature was wide, thorough and impressive. I met him at a time when he and his then wife, Sheila, seemed, for me, to epitomise everything that was fine about comparatively plain living and high thinking, even in a metropolis bubbling with temptations to serve mere fashion.

David never backed down on any argument about quality of work being done. He was a great appreciator of the best work, on the best subjects, and he himself contributed significantly to that store. He was truly loved by the people who worked with him on Monitor. The RSC's gain then, was arts television's loss.

Hugh Whitemore writes: David Jones had the deepest voice I've ever known. A marvellous subterranean rumble. For the last 20 years he had made his home in New York with Joyce Tenneson and would stay with us whenever he came to London. That familiar rumble from the spare room was the unmistakeable reminder that David was here. He was a truly civilised man. He relished poetry and loved music, of all sorts. He was a man who appreciated excellence, in the theatre, in wine and in conversation. He was a man of delightful habit. He would sit at our kitchen table every evening, sipping his fastidiously mixed martini and describing the art exhibition he had visited or the old friend he had lunched with. His friendship is irreplaceable.

His work reflected his very idio-syncratic tastes and enthusiasms. He excelled in the plays of Gorky and Granville Barker; in the work of his friends David Mercer, Richard Nelson and Harold Pinter; David's production of The Hothouse was, in my view, one of the very best of all Pinter interpretations. And I remember Mercer's admiration for the production of The Governor's Lady, which David did for the RSC. His work in television was exceptional, beginning with Huw Wheldon's much admired Monitor and culminating on the BBC's Play of the Month.

Among his feature films I consider Jacknife (1989), with Robert De Niro as a Vietnam veteran, shamefully underrated. As for Langrishe, Go Down, his finest work, it approaches perfection.

I worked with David only once: on the movie version of 84 Charing Cross Road, for which I wrote the screenplay. We wanted Anne Bancroft, as Helen Hanff, to speak words in memory of a great friend who had died. David chose a passage from John Donne. I now do the same for him:

"All mankinde is of one Author, and is in one volume; when one Man dies, one Chapter is not torne out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every Chapter must be so translated; God emploies several translators; some peeces are translated by age, some by sicknesse, some by warre, some by justice; but Gods hand is in every translation; and his hand shall binde up all our scattered leaves againe, for that Librarie where every booke shall lie open to one another."

He and Joyce had enjoyed a happy evening with friends. Later that night, he died in his sleep.

· David Hugh Jones, director, born February 19 1934; died September 19 2008