Mark Shivas was a television and film producer of great distinction. During a career in which he rose to be Head of Films with the BBC, he was responsible for some 70 productions. These included such successes as The Six Wives of Henry VIII, The Evacuees, Rogue Male and Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads series, as well as such films as A Private Function (1984), Hideous Kinky (1998) and I Capture the Castle (2002).

Although he was invariably calm, courteous and circumspect, Shivas managed to make his productions turn out successfully while encouraging their writers and directors to think that the ideas were all their own — sometimes they were, sometimes they were not. His writers and directors knew that he would fight on their behalf with managements, which respected him for his loyalty and, above all, for his good sense.

For these virtues, and because the projects he chose managed to be popular and intellectually satisfying at the same time, he enjoyed the distinction — not shared by all successful producers — that his name came to be known to a wider public.

Mark Shivas was born in Banstead, Surrey, in 1938. From Whitgift School in Croydon, he went to Merton College, Oxford, to read law. He had always shown a strong interest in film, and his first job, in 1961, was as assistant editor of Movie Magazine. There he scored a coup by interviewing Claude Chabrol. He asked him: “Didn’t your last film cost a lot?” Chabrol replied: “No, it cost very little, but it lost a lot.”

In l964 Shivas joined Granada TV where he became a director, for the first and last time in his life, on What the Papers Say, and a producer and the presenter of Cinema. It was probably his quiet screen presence that caused some intelligent executive to recruit him to BBC drama four years later.

His first production for the BBC was The Six Wives of Henry VIII with Keith Michell, probably the best Henry before or since. This won Shivas the Italia Prize, for the first time. Later he produced Henry as a feature film directed by Waris Hussein.

In the next decade his output was unrivalled, and the directors Hussein, Alan Clarke and Michael Lindsay-Hogg flourished under his benevolent eye. Such writers as John Hopkins, David Hare, Howard Schumann and Kingsley Amis were pleased to work with him.

Of the many productions for which he was responsible until 1988, when he became Head of Drama, some are still vividly recalled, such as Casanova, the mini-series written by Dennis Potter, and The Evacuees, Jack Rosenthal’s play about his childhood, directed by Alan Parker. In the same year, 1975, he produced 84 Charing Cross Road, rated by many as better than the film and stage versions, and The Glittering Prizes, with Tom Conti as Frederic Raphael’s alter ego.

In 1977 Tom Stoppard wrote a play for International Refugee Year called Professional Foul. It was very funny, very moving and very irritating to the Eastern Bloc. Shivas produced it, Lindsay-Hogg directed it, and it was a great success. It should have been entered for the Italia Prize but it was rejected, possibly for fear of offending the Russians. It was shown all over the world except behind the Iron Curtain.

Many of Shivas’s best productions were destroyed. The 1970s were a period of puritanical destruction when tapes were removed to make room for more. Secrets, a farce written by Michael Palin and Terry Jones, was destroyed, but fortunately Shivas had transferred the show on to VHS. Many years later it was tidied up and issued as a DVD in the Ripping Yarns series.

From 1980 Shivas became a freelance producer, working mainly for Southern Pictures, and one of his biggest projects was the eight-part series Winston Churchill, the Wilderness Years; Robert Hardy is still remembered as an unlikely but excellent Churchill with Siân Philips as his wife.

Shivas rarely experienced failure, so the reaction to another eight-part series, The Borgias, must have been a shock. The critics did not like it, nor did the viewers. Shivas remained calmly loyal to his cast and director. His reputation was secure enough to weather the criticism, and he did so with characteristic sangfroid. He then made Moonlighting, starring Jeremy Irons, which won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

In 1984 Shivas produced Alan Bennett’s A Private Function with Maggie Smith and Michael Palin. He had never worked in theatre but in 1985 he produced for Patrick Garland, directing Alec McCowen in Kipling. Unusually, this was broadcast on Channel 4.

In 1988 Shivas was appointed Head of Drama at the BBC, working with Jack Clayton, Stephen Frears and Mark Rylands, and producing among other things Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads. Eventually, in 1993, he became the first Head of Films, and he executive-produced more than a score of feature films, including Priest, directed by Antonia Bird, Michael Winterbottom’s Jude and Hideous Kinky, starring Kate Winslet.

In 1997 he formed an independent production company, Perpetual Motion Pictures (a title typical of his wry sense of humour) and made The Cambridge Spies and Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads 2.

In 2006 he formed Headline Pictures with Stewart Mackinnon and Kevin Hood; as chairman he made invaluable contributions to a range of film projects. However, he now began to be affected by the cancer that was to lead to his death. Typically, he remained passionately interested until the end in many projects, especially Quartet by Ronald Harwood. He will be much missed, especially by the actors, directors and writers whom he so greatly inspired.

Shivas is survived by his civil partner of 11 years, Karun Thakar.

Mark Shivas, television producer and Head of Films, BBC, 1993-97, was born on April 24, 1938. He died of cancer on October 11, 2008, aged 70