Celebrity Biographies
David Hugh-Jones
Briton David Hugh Jones was not a particularly well-known director, even in his native Britain. But he has some other interesting film. In addition, he was a prolific stage director in London, where his adaptations of Gorky’s plays are especially remembered. Jones passed away on September 22, at the age of 74. He suffered a heart attack.
Born on February 19, 1934, in the coastal town of Poole (Dorset) in southern England, David Hugh Jones was the son of a mathematics teacher and a Protestant reverend. He studied English Philology at Cambridge, and later was in the Navy, stationed in Hong Kong. Returning to Britain, he began working at the BBC, directing various programmes, and later moved to the theater in the 1960s as Artistic Director for the Royal Shakespeare Company. He eventually became a stage director, a facet for which he is well remembered among English theater enthusiasts, especially since in the 1970s he staged four plays by Gorki that greatly contributed to popularizing the Russian writer. Apparently especially memorable was his montage of ‘The Enemies’, starringHelen Mirren , Ben Kingsley , and Patrick Stewart .
He alternated making episodes of British television series with various works for cinema. She directed The Risk of Betrayal , again with Kingsley and also with Jeremy Irons , a drama about infidelity that had a script by the writer Harold Pinter , another name closely linked to British theater. Jones himself staged the occasional Pinter play on Broadway. He is also the director of the memorable The Final Letter , which recounted the close epistolary relationship between a New York reader ( Anne Bancroft ) and the London bookseller who sends her the volumes she reads, based on Helen Haff’s novel and her stage version of James Roose-Evans. Another of his interesting titles wasJacknife , in which Robert De Niro was a struggling Vietnam vet.
In recent years, Jones was surviving as the director of motley TV series, including Law & Order and Ghost Whisperer . “He was a fatherly director, but without pomposity. He never infantilized the actors who worked with him. We had a relationship of absolute equality, which is not very common in the theater, ”explained actor Ben Kingsley moved after learning of his death.