Theatre, opera and television director who worked closely with Benjamin Britten
The theatre, opera and television director Basil Coleman, who has died aged 96, was a prolific and determined populariser of classic works. His acclaimed 10-part television adaptation of Anna Karenina (1977) starred Nicola Pagett and Eric Porter. For the BBC Shakespeare series he directed As You Like It (1978), with Helen Mirren: it was filmed at Glamis Castle and in the surrounding Scottish countryside, one of only two of the BBC Shakespeare series plays shot entirely on location.
His long association and friendship with Benjamin Britten began when the director Tyrone Guthrie made him assistant director on the composer's realisation of The Beggar's Opera with the English Opera Group at the Arts theatre, Cambridge (1948). Coleman then directed the first production of Britten's work for children Let's Make an Opera (1949), at Aldeburgh. Further premieres included the huge challenge of Billy Budd (1951) at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the first of many collaborations with the painter/designer John Piper; Britten's coronation opera, Gloriana (1953), again at Covent Garden; and The Turn of the Screw (1954) in Venice.
The opening of Gloriana was seen at the time as an anti-climax, the first-night audience being full of dignitaries who were expecting a Merrie England-style pageant to welcome the young Elizabeth II, rather than a powerful reflection on the hopeless love life and unsightly demise of an ageing Elizabeth I. Joan Cross, who played her, appeared wigless and undressed in the latter scenes of Coleman's lucid and moving production, which later played to far more appreciative houses. Britten knew that Coleman could provide spectacle, but was also a sensitive collaborator with great musical understanding. He was particularly good with young performers, as in his coaching of the young David Hemmings, the first to play the distressingly haunted boy Miles in The Turn of the Screw.
From 1954 Coleman ran the Crest theatre in Toronto, and then took a BBC TV directing course. The opera broadcasts he pioneered on television included Rigoletto, Eugene Onegin, La Bohème and Don Pasquale. Billy Budd (1966) won a Bafta award, and Falla's La Vida Breve was the first such broadcast in colour. Coleman was imaginative in his use of camera movement and angles, and respectful of the text.
Latterly, TV opera changed from new, studio-based productions to recordings made of pre-existing opera house performances, which interested him less, and he thereafter turned to directing plays and classic adaptations for television. He withdrew from the TV production of Peter Grimes because of Britten's insistence that it should be filmed at the Snape Maltings, Aldeburgh, rather than with the superior resources of the BBC Television Centre in London. This led to a rift, but they were eventually reconciled, and Coleman spent Christmas 1975 with the composer, who died the following December.
There were scores of other productions for stage and television, in the UK and abroad. One of the two plays that Coleman directed by the thriller writer Francis Durbridge, Suddenly at Home (1971), had a two-year run in London's West End.
Born in Bristol, Coleman grew up in what was then Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where his father was an executive in the postal service. Coleman's stepmother, Gwen Givern Chambers, joined the family when Coleman was three, his mother having died of influenza in 1918. Chambers was a devoted Fabian, pacifist, suffragette and vegetarian whose influence reached far into Coleman's life. As a small child, he clambered on to his parents' bed to hear his stepmother recount the plot of The Merchant of Venice, thus igniting a lifelong passion.
In 1931 he went to Frensham Heights school, Surrey, then attended the Central Drama School, in rooms by the Royal Albert Hall. Subsequently, he applied to train under Esme Church at the Old Vic. Lilian Baylis, the Old Vic's formidable manager, was on the audition panel and asked if he could sing. He got his place with an impromptu rendition of the national anthem.
Coleman was much impressed by Guthrie's inspired staging effects in the Old Vic's 1936-37 season. Guthrie placed Coleman and his fellow students, swathed in black cloaks, on stage with handheld spotlights to illuminate Laurence Olivier's charismatic Henry V as he vaulted on to a centre-stage ramp and launched into a passionate "Once more unto the breach".
With virtually no rehearsal, Coleman had to replace The Fool in King Lear, with an anxious John Gielgud descending the backstage stairs asking: "But does he know it? I'd rather he went on with the book if he doesn't!" Gielgud showed the greatest kindness in reassuring the young man.
Hard-working years acting in rep in Henley and Amersham followed. A conscientious objector during the second world war, Coleman was sent to work on fruit farms in Sussex, before being enlisted by Ruth Spalding's Pilgrim Players to tour morality plays to village halls and churches. He then rejoined the Old Vic company as a fully fledged actor. Along the way, he had been showing signs of developing from actor to director, encouraged by his mentor, Guthrie. After the war Coleman directed whole seasons at the Midland theatre in Coventry.
In his later years, Coleman was a particularly sympathetic teacher, and inspiration to young performers, directing many student productions and leading masterclasses, notably at the Britten-Pears School in Aldeburgh. He turned his hand to documentary-making, with A Pianist at Work (1982), about Murray Perahia.
Unfailingly kind and courteous, Coleman was relentlessly encouraging of his performers: "If you can give them confidence you're halfway there," he said. He has no immediate surviving relatives.
• Basil Woore Coleman, stage and television director, born 22 November 1916; died 19 March 2013