Mr. Yates was nominated for two Academy Awards for directing, for “Breaking Away” (1979), an underdog-triumphs story in which four local teenagers in Bloomington, Ind., take on a privileged team of bicycle racers from Indiana University; and for “The Dresser” (1983), an adaptation of Ronald Harwood’s play about an aging theater actor and his long-serving assistant, which starred Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay. (Both films, which Mr. Yates also produced, were nominated for best picture as well.) Mr. Yates’s reputation probably rests most securely on “Bullitt” (1968), his first American film — and indeed, on one particular scene, an extended car chase that instantly became a classic. The film stars Steve McQueen as a conscience-stricken lone-wolf San Francisco detective, and the chase begins with him behind the wheel of a Ford Mustang in a slow, cat-and-mouse pursuit of killers who were in a Dodge Charger. It escalates into high-speed screeches and thuds on city streets and ends in a fiery blast on a highway. Mr. Yates’s career was marked by a willingness to skip from genre to genre, and for a director with so many significant hits, he had an up-and-down career.