For some 60 years Clive Barnes was one of the best-known and mostadmired critics of dance and drama on both sides of the Atlantic. And since he was determined not to retire, his death leaves newspapers and magazines in Manhattan, London and Italy bereft of a valued regular contributor.

A hugely prolific journalist, he was celebrated for his colourful writing, and readers treasured famous examples of his dry wit such as “Television is the first truly democratic culture — the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.”

As drama and dance critic of The New York Times in the 1970s he was one of the most powerful arbiters of the city’s theatrical life, and he appeared to relish the inevitable controversies and gossip as he took on powerful producers.

He recalled how shortly after he began at The New York Times he had a telegram from the influential producer David Merrick saying: “The honeymoon’s over.” Barnes replied: “Didn’t know we were married. Didn’t know you were that kind of boy,” and copied the telegrams to Variety.

Times Archive, 1974: Clive Barnes's New York Notebook

Andy Warhol, complete with ever-open tape-recorder, survives with nervously smiling face, and confidently ruffled hair

• Clive Barnes: Why do I love Spoleto?

On one famous occasion he gave a poor review to a play by David Rabe which the impresario Joe Papp had chosen to mark the start of his tenure as director of the Lincoln Centre Theatre programme. Papp rang Barnes at home at midnight and threatened him.

Clive Barnes was born in London in 1927. He was educated at Emanuel School, in south London, and then at King’s College London, where he briefly and inconclusively studied medicine with the intention of becoming a psychiatrist. But in 1946 he was called up into the RAF, where he spent much of his time preparing psychological tests, assisting in adult education and playing rugby. On his discharge in 1948 he abandoned any medical aspirations, partly because he had found that the sight of blood made him faint, and instead went up to St Catherine’s College, Oxford, to study English language and literature, graduating with honours in 1951.

He had long intended to be a critic of drama and dance. He was brought up by his divorced mother (a planned remarriage with her husband, an ambulance driver, fell through when he died in an accident). She first took him to the theatre in 1937, being for a time secretary to a theatrical agent, and he became a regular gallery-goer during the London Blitz. At first his interests were solely dramatic, but during the war the same London stage, the New Theatre in St Martin’s Lane, later the Albery and now the Noël Coward, was used by the Old Vic company headed by Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson, and by the Sadler’s Wells (now English National) Opera and Sadler’s Wells (now Royal) Ballet. So his interests spread over to opera and dance. He attended his first dance performance in 1943. He was also a devoted concertgoer, especially of the Albert Hall proms.

Barnes started to write about ballet in 1949 for the Oxford University magazine Isis. In 1950 he co-edited, with John Percival, the magazine of the Oxford University Ballet Club, Arabesque, and in that same year he became a contributor to the newly founded international magazine Dance and Dancers, first edited by Peter Williams. He remained associated with this, first in 1951 as assistant editor, then associate editor, executive editor and finally, after 1965, New York editor until its last issue in 1998.

On graduating from Oxford in 1951 Barnes worked for nearly nine years as an administrative officer in the town planning section of the London County Council architect’s department, while maintaining a freelance career writing about the arts. In 1951 he became for a time the dance critic of the New Statesman. About that time he was also busy writing his first book, which was also arguably his most interesting and original. Entitled Ballet in Britain since the War and published in 1953, it was a slim paperback which, in spite of its modest size, succeeded in giving an account of every British ballet company during that period and in comparing them with their French and American opposite numbers.

In 1956 he began a long association with the Daily Express which ended only in 1965 when he emigrated to the United States. There he eventually became a television critic as well as writing on film, drama, music and dance.

He was also concurrently dance critic, 1959-65, for The Spectator and, more important, was from 1962 to 1965 the first dance critic of The Times (hitherto that post had been filled by the chief music critic). From 1956 he was the London correspondent for Dance Magazine in New York, starting an association which has continued until this month.

In addition to his critical reviewing in London, he was from 1960 to 1965 the executive editor not only of Dance and Dancers but also of Plays and Players and of Music and Musicians, issued by the same publishing house, Hansom Books.