Jules Dassin, the director who died yesterday in Athens at 96, helped set the tone for postwar action films with “The Naked City” and “Rififi.”

He had an international smash hit with “Never on Sunday” (1960), which he also wrote and later adapted as the Broadway musical “Illya Darling” (1967). Both productions starred his glamorous Greek wife, Melina Mercouri, as the slightly daffy prostitute who takes one day off each week to study.

Although often considered a foreign director because he worked in Italy, France, and Greece, and less often in America, Dassin grew up in Harlem. He acquired his show-business chops in the Yiddish theater and in Hollywood before leaving for Europe when work for him dried up in 1952 after he was named by director Edward Dmytryk in testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He later admitted that he’d been a communist party member briefly in the late 1930s, but said he quit after Dunkirk.

In Europe, Dassin directed the noir classic “Rififi” (1955), often credited as the first modern “caper” flick. Though shot in Paris and in French, the film became a moderate success stateside and helped renew Dassin’s reputation when it was re-released in 2000. He went on to direct “Topkapi” (1964) — a more humorous version of “Rififi” — and a number of other action films. While many of his other films were well-received, his career stands as one of great promise unfulfilled.

“I should be working, I should be making films about Harlem, about things and places I know,” he told the Washington Post in 1971. “I’d have been a better film director had I been able to continue my work in the United States.”

The son of immigrant Russian Jews, Dassin was born in Middletown, Conn., where his father was an improvident barber. The family moved from apartment to apartment, one step ahead of bill collectors, and ended up living in Harlem. Dassin attended Morris High School in the Bronx. After graduation, he spent two years traveling in Europe and once told an interviewer that his greatest theater experience was seeing a Yiddish production of “King Lear” starring “an actor who was almost a dwarf but who was 30 feet tall dramatically.” Returning to New York, he joined the Artef Players, a Jewish socialist collective.

In 1937, he starred in “Revolt of the Beavers,” a Marxist children’s musical staged by the WPA Federal Theatre Project. He worked summers as entertainment director at Camp Nitgedaiget, a Borscht Belt retreat run by the Furriers Union. Scouted by Hollywood after he directed “Medicine Show” on Broadway in 1940, Dassin trained with Alfred Hitchcock and Garson Kanin. His first film job was directing a short adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1941) as a kind of tryout for MGM. From there, he directed a series of routine comedies and B features. Frustrated, he staged a 14-month strike, but MGM refused to let him out of his seven-year contract.

In 1947, he left for Universal, where his first feature was “Brute Force,” starring Hume Cronyn and Burt Lancaster, generally seen by critics as the first work to show Dassin’s mature style. In the police procedural “Naked City,” Dassin helped pioneer on-location action filming in New York. It was a big hit and the film’s biggest star, as several critics pointed out, was the city itself. He made a few more pictures for Hollywood, then felt the sting of the blacklist. After directing Bette Davis in the unsuccessful Broadway revue “Two’s Company” (1952) he left for Europe.

Settling in Paris, Dassin was initially hired to direct Zsa Zsa Gabor in a comedy called “Public Enemy No. 1,” but was fired after the star questioned his politics. In need of money, he wangled the low-budget “Rififi” job. Among its most influential elements is a 30-minute segment with absolutely no dialog during which a group of thieves pulls off an intricate heist. “Rififi” won Dassin Best Director honors at Cannes in 1955 and went on to be the top-grossing French film on record at that time.

From there, he went on to make “Celui qui doi mourir,” “He Who Must Die” (1957), a kind of modern sequel to “The Odyssey” adapted from the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. The film got good reviews in America, but Dassin still found himself shunned by Hollywood.

It was with “Never on Sunday” that Dassin was more or less rehabilitated. By then married to Mercouri, he continued to work mainly in Europe. But it was while the couple was on Broadway with “Illya Darling” in 1967 that a group of colonels staged a coup in Greece. Dassin and Mercouri became leaders among the anti-junta activists, and were at one point indicted in Athens for plotting to overthrow the government. Mercouri was stripped of her citizenship. Dassin shot “The Rehearsal” in 1974 as a re-enactment of a massacre of Greek students by the junta the previous year. The film starred Laurence Olivier, Maximilian Schell, and Arthur Miller, among others, working for free. But by the time it was to make its debut the junta had been ousted and it was never released.

In 1974, Mercouri gave up acting after being elected to the Greek parliament as a fiery Socialist. She became culture minister in 1981 and served in the post for more than eight years, setting her sights on returning the 2,500-year-old Parthenon sculptures to their homeland. She died in 1994.

Dassin’s last picture was the disappointing “Circle of Two” (1980), starring Richard Burton. Dassin’s son, Joe, a popular singer in Europe, dropped dead of a heart attack later that year. After he heard the news, Jules Dassin suffered a heart attack himself and never made another film.

He remained active in the quest for the Elgin Marbles.

“If there is anything I want to be remembered for it is for fulfilling Melina’s dream,” he told the Associated Press in a 1997 interview.