Director Michael Powell; Stylish British Filmmaker

British film director Michael Powell, whose quirky, mystic and baroque images influenced the generation of American filmmakers that included Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, died Monday night.

A spokesman for the British National Film Archive announced Tuesday that Powell, 84, had died at his home in Avening in Gloucestershire, England.

The director of such prestigious films as “The Thief of Baghdad,” “The Red Shoes,” “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” and “Black Narcissus” had been ill for about two weeks, the spokesman said without announcing a specific cause of death.

As visual and romantic as he was eccentric, he was considered unique among British filmmakers. While his films reflected his belief that art is not necessarily explicit, many of his pictures made money--some of them a lot.

“Of his generation, he was unquestionably the most innovative and most creatively brilliant filmmaker this country ever boasted,” said fellow director Sir Richard Attenborough on Tuesday. “He broke new ground and set standards of quality which almost no other filmmaker ever did, and he will be deeply, deeply missed.”

His roots ran deep in the British film industry for he wrote what is believed his first script for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Blackmail.” The film was envisioned as a silent but was remade in 1929 as England’s first sound picture.

Powell was of the prosperous English middle class, educated at Bulwich College and trained for banking. But his love of the infant cinema sent him to Irish director Rex Ingram, who became his friend and mentor.

He directed a series of cheap comedies and detective stories before meeting Hungarian emigre Emeric Pressburger, who died in 1988. Their directing and writing team became one of the most creative partnerships in British cinema.

Their first movie was “Spy in Black” in 1938, devised for the German actor Conrad Veidt. It was titled “U-Boat 29” in the United States.

“49th Parallel,” starring Laurence Olivier, followed in 1940. Titled “The Original Story of the Invaders” in the United States, it won an Academy Award for best original story (by Pressburger) and was nominated for best picture and best script.

In 1941, the partners made “One of Our Aircraft Is Missing” about British fliers forced to parachute into Nazi-occupied Holland. The script was nominated for an Academy Award.

Pressburger and Powell formed the Archers Film Producing Co. in 1942. The team took joint credits for producing, directing and script, but Powell was largely responsible for directing.

Their first effort, “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” (1943), offended Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The movie was based loosely on a cartoon character--a British bureaucrat who was basically decent but complacently old-fashioned and who ran offices while others fought. It even featured a sympathetic German character (like Blimp a survivor of World War I), and Churchill feared it would undermine morale during the war.

But Powell and Pressburger persisted and it became a classic, although Powell had been warned by the minister of war that “the Old Man (Churchill) will be very cross and you’ll never get a knighthood.”

He never did.

“The Red Shoes” (1948) was about a ballerina torn between her art and love. It featured Moira Shearer in her first screen role, and she was supported by a brilliant international cast of dancers--Leonide Massine, Robert Helpmann, Frederick Ashton and Ludmilla Tcherina.

Brian Easdale won an Academy Award for the music; Powell and Pressburger were nominated for best story and the film itself for best picture of the year.

It also inspired countless little girls in the Western world to stay at the barre.

In 1946 they made one of the most critically acclaimed films of all time, “A Matter of Life and Death.” It starred David Niven as a brain-damaged flier who hovers between this world and the next and was widely praised for its melding of battle horror and mysticism.

Their “The Tales of Hoffman” in 1951 combined opera, ballet and rich production design.

The Archers company disbanded after making two more war movies, both in 1956, “The Battle of the River Plate” (titled “Pursuit of the Graf Spee” in the United States) and “Ill Met by Moonlight” (shown in the United States as “Night Ambush”).

Late in his life, Scorsese and Coppola brought Powell to California as a filmmaker in residence and younger critics discovered his work. In 1984 he married Thelma Schoonmaker, a Scorsese film editor.

Back in London in 1987, he told a Los Angeles Times interviewer who had asked him to evaluate his career that “I am a craftsman, and a craftsman I shall remain until I die. I know only one craft--the craft of making films. The art (and he viewed art as a lower-case maxim) of telling a story to the largest audience that ever said ‘Tell me a story.’ ”