Tony Tenser was one of the British film industry's most colourful characters. It was Tenser who came up with the term “sex kitten” to promote Brigitte Bardot to the British public. He opened London's first private cinema club to evade censorship restrictions and as a producer he made a wide range of films, including “nudie” documentaries, comedies and horror.

He was driven primarily by commercial considerations, but he and his production partner then, Michael Klinger, also backed Roman Polanski's first English-language films, Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-sac (1966), through their Compton Films company. After splitting with Klinger, Tenser formed another company, Tigon, which was a substantial force in British cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, as a producer and a distributor.

It was with horror that Tigon made its most lasting impression, briefly challenging Hammer's supremacy in the genre. Witchfinder General (1968), in which Vincent Price played the 17th-century witch-hunter Matthew Hopkins, is widely acknowledged now as a masterpiece, though it was cut by the censors and savaged by critics at the time of release.

Born in 1920 in the East End of London, Samuel Anthony Tenser was one of seven children of Lithuanian- Jewish immigrants. His parents worked in the garment industry, and the family lived in a cramped tenement flat in Shoreditch. After grammar school Tenser applied to become an RAF pilot during the war but he failed the eyesight test, and served as a technician instead.

He joined the ABC cinema chain as a trainee manager and, according to Matthew Sweet's book Shepperton Babylon (2005), was promoted when he reported his boss for claiming wages for non-existent staff. He established a reputation for publicity stunts and joined the distributor Miracle Films as a publicist.

He also established a reputation for being able to coin eye-catching titles. Miracle bought the UK rights to the Brigitte Bardot comedy En effeuillant la marguerite (1956), which literally means “while plucking the daisy”. Tenser retitled it Mam'selle Striptease and then contrived a stunt in which a bunch of strippers demonstrated outside a cinema on the basis that the film was taking their customers away.

It was that stunt that brought him into contact with Michael Klinger, a stripclub owner, who wanted to branch out into films. They opened the Compton Cinema Club together in the basement of a Soho office block and quickly expanded into distribution and production. One of their first films was Naked as Nature Intended (1961). It masqueraded as a documentary about naturism while filling the screen with naked female flesh and it helped to create a new sub-genre.

Sometimes Tenser came up with not only the title of films, but also the storyline. The Yellow Teddybears (1963) was inspired by a newspaper story about a school where the girls advertised loss of virginity by wearing a small golliwog. After consulting the censors, Tenser substituted teddies for gollies. It was released in the US as Gutter Girls.

Tenser and Klinger bought the Windmill Theatre, London, which was famous for its nude girls, and it served as the principal setting in their film Secrets of a Windmill Girl (1966).

But it was not all nudity and sleaze. Tenser was familiar with Polanski's work when the Polish director and his regular producer Gene Gutowski came to see him with a synopsis for a film that eventually emerged as Repulsion, with Catherine Deneuve playing a character who is going mad. Tenser later recalled: “I guessed that if they were coming to me then they had already gone to everybody else, but Polanski was a name, so I said yes.

“I asked about the budget, and he [Gutowski] said £90,000. Well, we had never made a film for more than £60,000 and we didn't want to go broke, because it was a lot of money in those days. So they trimmed here and there and they got it down to £60,000.” They even argued over the number of hands that should be coming through the wall to torment Deneuve in the film's most famous scene. Tenser added: “In the end it came to more than £90,000, but it was such a brilliant film.”

He produced a wide variety of films at Tigon, including a version of Black Beauty (1971), the thriller Doomwatch (1972) and the comedies The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins (1971), For the Love of Ada (1972) and Not Now Darling (1973).

There was a dismal and misguided attempt to reinvent Norman Wisdom as a star of sex comedy in What's Good for the Goose (1969). But Tigon was a sufficiently large player to join forces with Paramount on the western Hannie Caulder (1971), which was shot in Spain and starred Raquel Welch.

Tigon championed the career of the ill-fated Michael Reeves, who directed only three features, including Witchfinder General, before dying at 25 of a drugs overdose. Tigon's other horror films include Reeves's The Sorcerers (1967), Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) and The Creeping Flesh (1973), with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

After leaving Tigon, Tenser was executive producer on Pete Walker's Frightmare (1974). Eventually he left the movie business, moved to the Lancashire town of Southport with his third wife Diane, who was 27 years his junior, and began a new business selling wicker chairs.

Tenser was reputedly the template for Roy Kinnear's character in the 1975 comedy Eskimo Nell, an executive who runs BUM Films. In his book Sweet wrote: “Of all these wild men of Wardour Street, it was Tony Tenser... who wielded the most influence and exhibited the most brazen ingenuity.” The film historian David McGillivray called him “the Irving Thalberg of the exploitation movie”. He was the subject of the book Beasts in the Cellar (2005) by John Hamilton.

He is survived by his third wife, Diane, and by the four children of his first two marriages.

Tony Tenser, film producer and distributor, was born on August 10, 1920. He died on December 5, 2007, aged 87