Craig Noel, who devoted more than seven decades of his life to San Diego's influential Old Globe Theater and was a pillar of the regional theatre community, has died at the age of 94.

Noel died of natural causes at his Mission Hills, Calif., home on Saturday, the theatre said.

"It seems impossible to contemplate a landscape without Craig Noel in it," current artistic director Jack O'Brien said in a statement.

"He always said of the Globe, that it was his cathedral."

Born in New Mexico and raised in San Diego, Noel first joined the fledgling Old Globe Theater in 1937 as a 22-year-old actor cast in the play The Distaff Side.

Just two years later, he had begun directing productions and — after a break to serve in the Armed Forces during the Second World War — he was named resident director in 1947.

He became the Globe's artistic director in 1949 and, within a decade, helped the community theatre graduate into a professional troupe — the first on the West Coast and eventually one of the 10 most prominent regional theatres of the U.S.

Throughout his career, he directed and produced more than 200 productions and also guided a host of these works to Broadway, including August Wilson's The Piano Lesson, Neil Simon's Rumors and Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Into the Woods.

He helped revive interest in the Bard's plays by establishing the San Diego National Shakespeare Festival and, during the 1960s, he also helped introduce modern playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht and Edward Albee to Southern California audiences through productions staged at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art.

Noel passed the artistic directorship to O'Brien in the early 1980s, but retained a leadership role at the theatre until his death. He also established a masters of fine arts in acting program at the University of San Diego and a bilingual playwriting program for San Diego public schools.

In 2007, he was honoured with the U.S. National Medal of Arts for his "decades of leadership as a pillar of the American theater."

A memorial at the Old Globe is pending.

With files from The Associated Press