He directed his first production for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Arts Theatre in 1962, Boris Vian's The Empire Builder, and two years later accepted the administrative post Artistic Controller at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), helping to plan programmes of new plays and European classics at the Aldwych Theatre in London.
[3] From 1973 to 1978, Jones was Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), at the Aldwych Theatre, where he directed plays by William Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, Anton Chekhov, Seán O'Casey, Maxim Gorky, Harley Granville-Barker, Graham Greene, and others, and became an honorary associate director of the RSC in 1991.
[7] Jones married the British actress Sheila Allen in 1964 with whom he had two sons, Jesse (of Brooklyn, New York) and Joseph (of Tucson, Arizona).
[8] After his divorce from Allen, Jones's partner of the last 20 years of his life was photographer Joyce Tenneson; the couple lived in New York at the time of his death.
Also produced Kean (Jean-Paul Sartre, 1954) for BBC television (starring Anthony Hopkins and directed by James Cellan Jones) (1978).