The film and theatre director Karel Reisz, who died on Monday aged 76, was best known for his films Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The French Lieutenant's Woman.
In his last decade Reisz concentrated on theatre direction, including critically acclaimed productions of Pinter and Beckett for the Gate Theatre in Dublin.
Born of Jewish extraction in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, Karel Reisz was sent to Britain just before the outbreak of the second World War and went to Leighton Park, a Quaker school near Reading, west of London; his parents subsequently died in Auschwitz. After serving as a pilot with one of the RAF's Czechoslovak squadrons in the closing stages of the war, Reisz read chemistry at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
It was while teaching in a grammar school that he became involved with the cinema. He wrote criticism for Sequence, which he co-edited ,and for Sight And Sound; published a book on the aesthetics of montage, The Technique Of Film Editing (1953); and became one of the first programme planners at the National Film Theatre. It was there, between 1956 and 1959, that four programmes designed as a manifesto and progress report for "Free Cinema" were showcased.
Aimed at undermining the prevailing blandness of British films, Free Cinema was so called, according to one of its publicity handouts, because "these films are free in the sense that their statements are entirely personal". While undoubtedly true of much of the foreign work incorporated in the programmes - notably early films from Franju, Polanski, Truffaut and Chabrol - this was much less evident in the British contribution, documentaries which emerged like dutiful responses to a classroom exercise in looking at how the other half lives in a classbound society.
Reisz went on to considerable success with his first feature, Saturday Night And Sunday Morning (1960). It now looks horribly cliché-ridden, although Albert Finney's performance as the young Nottingham factory worker, roaring "Don't let the bastards grind you down!" as he faces up to the bleak vista of his future retains its abrasive edge. With Free Cinema foundering as its French New Wave counterpart flourished, the film's success did mean that Reisz was able to produce Lindsay Anderson's debut feature, This Sporting Life (1962).
Having paid his dues to sociology, Reisz meandered for some years in search of something to replace it. Night Must Fall (1964), featuring a chilling performance from Albert Finney as a psychopathic youth given to crooning sweet nothings over a hatbox secreting a memento of his murderous desires, might have worked better had it adhered more slavishly to its source, a play by Emlyn Williams.
Then came Morgan, A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966) and Isadora (1968). Morgan, adapted from a TV play by David Mercer, is a sporadically interesting fantasy about a young artist (engagingly played by David Warner), reluctantly divorced from the wife he adores and prevented by a court injunction from approaching her, who dons a gorilla suit in order to exact a King Kong revenge on the society he blames for his predicament.
In 1974, Reisz resurfaced in America with The Gambler, a dark odyssey in which a compulsive gambler, incisively played by James Caan, a New York professor of literature given to lucid analysis of his own malady in his lectures on Dostoevsky, desperately tries to stave off brutal retribution by raising the money he owes. The Gambler released a vein of dark lyricism in Reisz that was to illuminate all his subsequent work, featuring characters to varying degrees and in various ways marginalised by society: Who'll Stop the Rain? (1978, also known as Dog Soldiers), in which an ex-GI finds his marginal involvement with drugs in Vietnam sending his life back home spiralling out of control; The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), eloquent in its treatment of the theme of repressed sexuality, even though Harold Pinter's script finds no proper answer to the problem of the dual-level narrative in John Fowles's source novel; Sweet Dreams (1985), Reisz's most perfectly realised and most underrated film, turning the unhappy life of singer Patsy Cline into the resonant tragedy of a couple caught between the devil of showbiz success and the deep blue sea of domestic bliss; and Everybody Wins (1990), an undeniably muddled adaptation of Arthur Miller's play Some Kind Of Love Story, which nevertheless makes a fascinating fist of the relationship between a private eye and a femme fatale as they evolve within the tangles of a film noir framework.
From 1991 to 2001, Reisz devoted himself to theatre direction in London (notably at the Almeida), Paris and Dublin.
He directed a number of plays for the Gate, beginning in 1993 with his production of Ibsen's A Doll's House, starring Niamh Cusack, for that year's Dublin Theatre Festival.
He was associated with the work of Pinter and Beckett, directing Moonlight and A Kind of Alaska as part of the Gate's first Pinter Festival, with Penelope Wilton, Iam Holm and Jim Norton in the leading roles. His production of Beckett's Happy Days with Rosaleen Linehan and Barry McGovern was particularly successful as part of the Gate's second Beckett Festival and went on to play at the Lincoln Centre in New York and the Almeaid Theatre in London, winning widespread critical acclaim.
Happy Days was revived in 1999 when the Gate Beckett Festival travelled to the Barbican Centre in London. In 1998, Reisz directed Eugene O'Neills Long Day's Journey into Night at the Gate, with Rosaleen Linehan and American actor Donald Moffat in the leading roles. In 2001, he returned with two further Pinter productions, a revival of A Kind of Alaska and Landscape, with Penelope Wilton and Stephen Brennan. His final production for the Gate, as part of the 2001 Dublin Theatre Festival was The Yalta Game, Brian Friel's adaptation of a Chekov short story, with Ciaran Hinds and Kelly Reilly in the leading roles.
His second wife, whom he married in 1963, was the American actor Betsy Blair: She and their three sons survive him.
Karel Reisz: born July 21 1926; died November 25th, 2002.