Colin Graham, the theatrical director and designer, who died on Friday at the age of 75, staged many of the operas of Benjamin Britten and directed the world premieres of all of them from 1954; a lifelong man of the theater, for the last 21 years he had been the artistic director of the St. Louis Opera.

In a career spanning more than half a century, Graham created outstanding operatic and theatrical productions for, among others, the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, the Old Vic, Glyndebourne, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He directed 55 world premieres, including Andre Previn’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1998) and David Carlson’s “Anna Karenina” (2007) at the new opera house in Miami.

He became a close friend of Benjamin Britten and produced his work all over the world. Graham’s world premiere staging of the composer’s last opera, “Death in Venice,” at the 1973 Aldeburgh Festival and later that year at Covent Garden, was widely praised.

In the mid-1960s Britten, too, had contemplated writing an opera of “Anna Karenina” for the Bolshoi company, one of the saddest mighthave-beens in operatic history, and had asked Graham to write the libretto, but the project was abandoned following the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia.

However, Graham did collaborate closely with Britten on “Curlew River” (1969), traveling to Venice where the composer was working for weeks at a time, and was his librettist for Britten’s miniature opera “The Golden Vanity” (1970); he also wrote libretti for operas by Richard Rodney Bennett and Stephen Paulus.

In 1974, Graham made his American debut with the U.S. premiere of Britten’s “Owen Wingrave” at Santa Fe; invited to start an opera company at St. Louis, he moved there following Britten’s death in 1976 and with encouragement from Britten’s partner, Peter Pears.

A man of catholic tastes, Graham moved easily between opera, musicals, and straight plays. He was always keen to woo those “who like music and the theater but suspect opera.” A master of stage spectacle, he directed — and frequently also designed — some 400 productions for opera, theater, and television.

His intention as a director was always “to illuminate, not to disguise.” He disliked eccentric productions that hindered the clear understanding of an opera or play. Typical of his insight was his advice to one male singer about overprojection: “Instead of throwing yourself at audiences,” Graham counseled, “you must invite them into your presence.”

Colin Graham was born on September 22, 1931, in London, and educated at Stowe. He had hoped to be a singer but accepting that his voice would never be good enough, enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art wanting first to act, then to sing, then to compose but always to direct; he was still at RADA when he landed his first professional engagement in 1950 as a student assistant stage manager. On his second night backstage, he was underneath the battlements in “Tosca” when Sara Menkes refused to jump to her death and had to be pushed off by the singer playing the gendarme, Sciarrone. “She immediately stood up on the other side,” Graham recalled, “and it looked as though she’d bounced.”

His first job as an assistant stage manager with the English Opera Group in 1953 — “It seemed a call from heaven,” he wrote — began a long relationship with the group’s founder, Britten.

Having proved himself with a revival of Britten’s “The Turn of the Screw,” the composer entrusted him with his new opera for children, “Noye’s Fludde.” With a premiere in July 1961, Graham’s production at Orford Church was hailed as “exceptionally inventive.” He became a friend of the composer and Britten’s preferred director.

At the Aldeburgh Festival of 1959, Graham was acclaimed for his “clever” production of Britten’s “The Rape of Lucretia” under Charles Mackerras; later that year, he produced a musical, “The Demon Barber,” at the Lyric, Hammersmith. In 1960, Graham’s production of Humphrey Searle’s “Diary of a Madman,” being staged for the first time in Britain at Sadler’s Wells, was hailed a masterpiece.

At the Old Vic in 1961, Graham made his debut as a Shakespeare director with “Twelfth Night,” in which a young Tom Courtenay played Feste; the same year he adapted Humperdinck’s opera “Hansel and Gretel” for BBC Television. In 1969, when a disastrous fire swept through the Maltings, Britten’s concert hall at Snape, Graham’s heroic restaging of a performance of Gluck’s “Idomeneo” in near-impossible conditions at Blythburgh’s medieval church was accomplished in just 60 hours.

Ever versatile, three years later, Graham revived the Frank Loesser musical “Kiss Me, Kate” at the Coliseum as a period piece from the late 1940s, when it first appeared. In the same theater, Graham produced his first Wagner opera, “Lohengrin.”

When Graham directed Prokofiev’s “War and Peace” at the Coliseum in October 1972, he spent two nights without sleep going through some 200 lighting cues.

Graham used screen projections and cycloramas to free up the stage for his impressive handling of the crowds and the facilitate scene changes. In 1978, Graham was appointed director of productions for the English National Opera.

The following year, he went to America to become associate artistic director with the Opera Theater of St. Louis.

In the early 1990s, Graham directed the William Walton Foundation’s opera course at Walton’s villa on Ischia, providing a few selected young singers with intensive study of acting, stage technique, and vocal coaching.

Colin Graham refused a funeral. He was unmarried.