Tristram Powell inherited the curiosity about people that marked his father, the novelist Anthony Powell. His natural warmth came from his mother, Violet Pakenham. The combination enabled him to become a particularly skilled and versatile director, notably of arts documentaries for television.
His gifts and his upbringing made him interested in and comfortable around authors, artists and actors. He was sensitive to their abilities and deft at soothing difficult temperaments. His insight into how they thought allowed him to get the best out of those central to the culture of their time.
From the late 1960s onwards he directed profiles of the likes of Samuel Beckett and Malcolm Lowry, secured rare, filmed interviews with Lucian Freud and Marcel Duchamp, and worked with Harold Pinter and