File photos of British theatre and film director, playwright and actor Peter Brook, who has died aged 97. Peter Brook was among the most influential theatre directors of the 20th century, reinventing the art by paring it back to drama's most basic and powerful elements. An almost mystical figure often mentioned in the same breath as Konstantin Stanislavsky, the Russian who revolutionised acting, Brook continued to work and challenge audiences well into his 90s. Best-known for his 1985 masterpiece "The Mahabharata", a nine-hour version of the Hindu epic, he lived in Paris from the early 1970s, where he set up the International Centre for Theatre Research in an old music hall called the Bouffes du Nord. PHOTOS