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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."
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