Lotfi Mansouri - Telegraph A series of deliciously indiscreet memoirs laid bare many of the rivalries of the opera world including, for example, Leyla Gençer, who was cast alongside Grace Bumbry in La Gioconda in 1967, refusing to speak to her co-star and telling Mansouri that "in Turkey we were brought up never to talk to our black servants." Lotfollah Mansouri was born in Tehran on June 15 1929 to a 15-year-old film-loving mother from an aristocratic family. He was thought to have been stillborn and was thrown in a bucket of ice; but a nurse noticed movement and he was revived. As a child he rubbed shoulders with the Shah's family. His father enrolled him at Edinburgh University to study Medicine. Mansouri reluctantly agreed to the course, but insisted on going to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he focused on Psychiatry. He would later say that "working with retarded children helps me understand opera singers." Soon he was studying singing - "I saved so many patients by not becoming a doctor," he maintained - and when the local tenor was drafted to the Korean War, Mansouri got his first break in Annie Get Your Gun, with Carol Burnett. Excerpts from operas such as La Bohème, Così fan tutte and Orpheus followed. However, he could not remember his lines and would ad lib, though few seemed to notice. "I discovered that when things go wrong, you must 'fake it" "til you make it,"" he recalled. UCLA, he noted, "turned out to be my operatic boot camp. I gained a ton of experience as a singer, actor, director, designer, prop master, dramaturge, coach and administrator. He took on gardening for a Scottish lady, lavatory cleaning at a high school summer camp and cashiering in a Hollywood supermarket, where Zsa Zsa Gábor would spend $120 a week on frozen fish for her cats. He also forgot his native tongue and acquired a West Coast accent. After working briefly as a teacher (he taught Frank Sinatra's son), he tried his luck in Hollywood, playing Enrico Caruso in The Day I Met Caruso (1956). That in turn led to a lucrative part in a beer commercial. He would later work with Luciano Pavarotti in Yes Giorgio, which bombed. Gradually Mansouri became established in Los Angeles as a stage director, often working on student productions. On one occasion he appeared as an extra in Otello with San Francisco Opera. He kept his singing going, taking lessons with Lotte Lehmann and Fritz Zweig (the cousin of Stefan), who took him to Europe in 1958 and introduced him to the opera houses of Salzburg, Bayreuth and Paris, and to singers such as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Lisa Della Casa and Magda Olivero. Back in America, Mansouri found himself assisting the director Herbert Graf in Santa Barbara, which included singing the role of Monostatos in The Magic Flute. He followed Graf to Zurich Opera in 1960 and was soon allowed to direct his own productions, starting with Gian Carlo Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors. That summer he took part in Friedelind Wagner's young artists" programme at Bayreuth. He later moved to Geneva, but increasingly guest-directing invitations arrived from houses in both Europe and America, including the Met and San Francisco, where he directed Die Walküre in 1963. On opening night the spotlight went so awry that the face of Siegmund (Jon Vickers) was left in darkness while the singer's crotch was gloriously illuminated. Mansouri also worked with Tehran Opera during the last decade of the Shah's reign. Mansouri joined the Canadian Opera in 1976 and persuaded supporters that their minimum donation should rise from $10 to $100. He acquired a derelict gas works to house the company, established a permanent chorus and orchestra and persuaded Joan Sutherland to appear. He believed that surtitles opened up opera. "Now, Wagner doesn't seem so long," he would joke, adding that the main opponents were the critics: "They wanted to be the only ones who knew what was going on." At San Francisco Opera, where he moved in 1988, Mansouri not only ran the company but also continued to direct new productions. He appointed the Scottish conductor Donald Runnicles as music director and oversaw the $86 million upgrade of the city's War Memorial Opera House after the 1989 earthquake, using the opportunity of temporary venues "to take the opera to the people and demonstrate that opera can be flexible." He formally retired in 2001. Mansouri's books include An Operatic Life (1982), looking at his Iranian background; An Operatic Journey (2010), which settled a number of personal scores; and the anecdote-strewn True Tales from the Mad, Mad, Mad World of Opera (2012), which relates how a drunk Boris Yeltsin lunged at the soprano Carol Vaness at a White House dinner. Round-faced, balding and wearing huge glasses, Mansouri was a larger-than-life character with a delicious sense of the ridiculous. He loved to recall the occasion when Joan Sutherland failed to show up for the dress rehearsal of La Traviata and he stepped in as the delicate Violetta. Lotfi Mansouri married, in 1954, Marjorie (Midge) Thompson, who survives him with their daughter. Lotfi Mansouri, born June 15 1929, died August 30 2013