Stuart Rosenberg was a jobbing American television director when he came across the novel Cool Hand Luke in a Hollywood bookshop. He went on to turn Donn Pearce’s story of a freewheeling rebel into one of the classic antiauthoritarian films of the 1960s.

Paul Newman played the convict Luke Jackson, who refuses to accept either authority or defeat, no matter what the odds or the challenge, whether it is a game of poker, a fist fight or a bet on the number of eggs he can eat.

Rosenberg and Newman made three more movies together. And although Newman worked with Hitchcock, Huston, Altman and Scorsese, he maintained that Rosenberg was as good as any of them.

Rosenberg was best known for crime and prison dramas, but his biggest commercial hit was the haunted-house movie The Amityville Horror (1979), which was supposedly inspired by a true story about an American family who move into a house that has been the scene of several murders and find that events have left behind their own frightening legacy. It spawned several sequels and a recent remake.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1927, Rosenberg studied Irish literature at New York University. He worked as a teacher and as apprentice television editor and quickly moved up the career ladder in the developing industry. By the late 1950s he was regularly directing episodes of the crime series Naked City.

He was hired to direct the feature film Murder, Inc. (1960), but a strike forced him to abandon the project and he returned to the small screen, picking up where he left off, with such landmark American shows as Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1959-61) and The Untouchables (196062).

He also directed three episodes of The Twilight Zone (1960-63), including the famous 1960 instalment I Shot an Arrow into the Air, in which the writer Rod Serling had three astronauts land on a strange, unfamiliar planet that turns out to be Earth — the same device Serling used a few years later in Planet of the Apes (1968).

His next film, Question 7 (1961), a drama about religious persecution in Germany, was an award-winner at the Berlin Film Festival, but was not widely seen and did little to improve his film prospects.

In 1963 he won an Emmy for an episode of The Defenders, but his big-screen ambitions got back on track only when he discovered the novel Cool Hand Lukeand pitched it to Jack Lemmon’s production company, Jalem. “It was the first time I had come across an existentialist hero, not an antihero, in American literature,” he said.

The 1967 film version provided Newman with one of his best roles, that of the irresponsible, irrepressible Jackson, sent to jail for vandalising parking meters. Winning a poker game on a bluff, Luke sums up his philosophy when he says: “Sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand.”

It was the producer, Gordon Carroll, who cast Newman, rather than Rosenberg, and he got the part only because Telly Savalas was unavailable, making The Dirty Dozenin England at the time.

Luke is unwilling or unable to accept authority and he falls foul of the sadistic prison captain, Strother, Martin, who provided the film with another classic line when he comments, in the face of Luke’s continued obstinacy: “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.” It is a line that Luke mimics later in the film.

At 40 Rosenberg had finally established himself as a movie director with Cool Hand Luke. He worked again for Jalem on his next film The April Fools (1969), a romantic comedy starring Jack Lemmon and Catherine Deneuve.

And he worked with Newman again on three more films, WUSA (1970), Pocket Money (1972) and the Lew Harper thriller The Drowning Pool (1975), but none of them came close to the iconic achievement of Cool Hand Luke.

During the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s Rosenberg was a popular choice with some of the top stars of the era, directing Elliott Gould in Move (1970), Walter Matthau in An Investigation of Murder, aka The Laughing Policeman (1973), Charles Bronson in Love and Bullets (1979) and Robert Redford in Brubaker (1980), another southern prison drama, in which Redford is the eponymous warden who has himself admitted as an inmate to his new prison to experience conditions first hand.

Rosenberg’s forte appeared to be tight, macho dramas and thrillers, but he seemed determined to push himself with The Amityville Horror and Voyage of the Damned (1976), the true story of a boatload of Jews who leave Germany just before the outbreak of the Second World War, only to discover that no one will accept them.

After Brubaker, however, Rosenberg made only three more films and latterly taught directing at the American Film Institute, where his students included Darren Aronofsky. He is survived by his wife, to whom he had been married since 1950, and by his son, who also works in the film industry.

Stuart Rosenberg, film director, was born on August 11, 1927. He died of a heart attack on March 15, 2007, aged 79