David Jones was a theatre, television and occasional film director who cut his teeth on the BBC’s Monitor programme and had a long association with the Royal Shakespeare Company before moving to the United States, where he did most of his later work.

David Hugh Jones was born in Poole, Dorset, in 1934, attended Taunton School and took a first in English at Christ’s College, Cambridge. During National Service he was a second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery and in 1958 he joined BBC Television. He had expected to work on the early-evening magazine Tonight, but was diverted by Grace Wyndham Goldie, the formidable talks executive, to help on “a little programme about the arts”, though she warned him it might be short-lived.

In the event Monitor became a television landmark, taking the arts seriously while making them accessible to a wide audience. Under the tough yet avuncular and relentlessly enthusiastic Huw Wheldon it became an unofficial film school, nurturing the talents of not only Jones but also John Schlesinger, Ken Russell and, later, Melvyn Bragg. Although still in his early twenties when he joined Monitor, Jones was entrusted with some of the more important assignments and with his literary background was a natural choice for tackling writers.

In 1958 he went to Cambridge to make a film about the usually camera-shy E. M. Forster on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Jones not only directed the film but also interviewed Forster in his rooms at King’s College. Among Jones’s other subjects were Lawrence Durrell, Frank O’Connor, the Irish writer, and George Chapman, the Welsh painter. In 1962 Jones succeeded Humphrey Burton as Monitor’s editor.

In the same year he began his association with the Royal Shakespeare Company, as one of the directors on a season of mainly new plays at the Arts Theatre in London. But he did much of his work for the RSC at what became its permanent London home, the Aldwych Theatre, taking a prominent role after Trevor Nunn succeeded Peter Hall as artistic director in 1968.

Nunn was only 28 and of the experienced directors from the Hall regime only John Barton remained. So Jones and Terry Hands joined them and this quartet helped to shape the RSC over the next decade, being directly responsible for the majority of the productions while, more generally, developing the company’s artistic policy. Nunn apppointed Jones to, in effect, run the Aldwych end of the RSC, leaving Hands to concentrate on production.

Although the relationship between Jones and the more abrasive Hands was often fraught, the division of responsibility worked well and Jones proved to be just the safe, calm administrator that the Aldwych needed after a period of turmoil. Instead of concentrating on new works, as in the past, it was decided that the Aldwych would look to revivals of the lesser-known classics. Jones himself led the way with his productions of Maxim Gorky — who he regarded as unjustly neglected — starting with Enemies (1971) with a stellar cast including Alan Howard, Helen Mirren, Patrick Stewart, John Wood and Ben Kingsley.

In 1975 he directed another rarely performed piece, The Marrying of Ann Leete, by the Edwardian playwright and theatre manager Harley Granville Barker. The cast included Mia Farrow, the first American actress to join the RSC. But Jones ranged widely over the theatrical canon, from Shakespeare, directing Janet Suzman as Rosalind in As You Like It and Judi Dench as Imogen in Cymbeline, to Chekhov, Brecht and contemporary playwrights such as John Arden and David Mercer.

Jones was no Peter Brook, who brought to the RSC a highly personal approach, and he did not have Hands’s flair and originality, but he was a reliable all-rounder who took all sorts of work in his stride and by sympathetic handling brought the best out of actors. He finally left the RSC towards the end of the 1970s and moved to the Brooklyn Academy of Music Theatre in New York to set up a company on RSC lines.

While working for the RSC Jones had moved into television. He directed adaptations of short stories by Chekhov and Thomas Hardy, Farquhar’s comedy The Beaux’ Stratagem and an Irish drama about a love affair between a shy Irish girl and an older German student, Langrishe, Go Down, from a screenplay by Harold Pinter based on a novel by Aidan Higgins and starring Jeremy Irons and Judi Dench. Jones went on to have a long association with Pinter’s plays. He also contributed two productions to the BBC Shakespeare cycle, an enjoyable take on The Merry Wives of Windsor with Richard Griffiths (who needed no padding) as Falstaff, and Pericles.

In 1983 Jones made his bow in the cinema with Betrayal, the Pinter play about marital infidelity inspired (it later emerged) by the writer’s seven-year affair with the television presenter, Joan Bakewell. Jones retained the form of the play, which tells the story backwards, and while never quite disguising its theatrical origins drew fine performances from Ben Kingsley, as the cuckolded husband, Jeremy Irons and Patricia Hodge.

His next work for cinema was 84 Charing Cross Road (1986), based on the correspondence over many years between Helene Hanff, a feisty New Yorker, and a London bookseller, who never met. Again it owed much to the acting, of Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins as the pen friends, though Jones judiciously opened up the piece from its previous incarnations on stage and television. A film of Kafka’s The Trial (1993), with Kyle McLachlan as Joseph K., was, despite a Pinter script and a strong supporting cast, disappointingly dull.

Jones directed several Pinter plays for the theatre, including revivals of Old Times (1985) in the West End and Los Angeles and No Man’s Land (1994) and The Caretaker (2003) in New York. From the late 1980s he worked mostly in the US, dividing his time between television, where he contributed episodes to several popular series but did little that was original, and the stage. He taught drama at Yale University and from 2004 held masterclasses in film at Columbia University.

Last year, at Chichester and then at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, he directed The Last Confession by Roger Crane, in which David Suchet gave a spellbinding performance as the “pope-maker” Cardinal Benelli who berates himself over the death of John Paul I, the Pope who died after only 33 days in office, in 1978.

Jones’s marriage to the actress Sheila Allen was dissolved and for the past 20 years he had lived with the photographer Joyce Tenneson. He had two sons from his marriage.

David Jones, theatre, television and film director, was born on February 14, 1934. He died in his sleep on September 19, 2008, aged 74