Paris - Peter Brook, one of the most creative and controversial stage directors of post-war Britain, died at the age of 97. He passed away in Paris, and has been residing in France since 1974, according to reports. 

Peter Stephen Paul Brook was born in west London in March 1925, as the son of Jewish immigrants. His career took in Shakespeare plays, Broadway musicals and cinema, including an adaptation of Lord of the Flies. He did not have a theatrical background, but after studying at Oxford University his talent was quickly spotted.

By his mid-20s he had a reputation as the grand old enfant terrible of the British stage. Over the ensuing decades Brook put his stamp on the theatre, breaking many established conventions. His stage productions, starring some of theatre's most distinguished thespians, both enthralled and shocked audiences.

His production of the Peter Weiss play, Marat/Sade, originally staged in London, was well received on Broadway and won Brook a Tony award for Best Director in 1966. His final production for the RSC, in 1970, was a memorable, airborne version of A Midsummer Night's Dream using trapezes and stilts. It was an attempt to capture the strangeness of a play about dreams, fairies and spurned lovers.

Film career
Controversially, in the 1970s he turned his back on English theatre and moved to Paris where he founded the International Centre of Theatre Research, an experimental theatre company.

With it, he visited many countries and put on productions for a variety of audiences, including one for drug addicts, and another for psychiatric patients. One memorable production, staged in France, Australia and America, was The Conference of the Birds, from a medieval Persian poem. In Australia it was staged in a quarry.

Brook also made a number of films, including Lord of the Flies in 1963, and The Tragedy of Carmen - the stage production of which had won awards.

He was responsible for a film of Shakespeare's King Lear, released in 1971 and starring Paul Schofield, which divided the critics, one of them suggesting that its bleak production and gory scenes should have seen it renamed The Night of the Living Dead.

In 2012 a documentary, The Tightrope, directed by his son, Simon, examined Brook's directing style, using hidden cameras so the actors would not be distracted. The title referred to Brook's habit of getting his actors to walk across a carpet on an imaginary tightrope, doing whatever they fancied but conveying the impression they were high up in the air.

It has been said that Brook was more interested in ideas than anything else. He seemed to have a desire to shock and had been described as an astounding combination of insight, intuition and effrontery.

Brook married the actress Natasha Parry in 1951. She died in 2015.