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John Daly was a British-born film producer and distributor who moved to the United States in the 1980s and helped to finance such critical and box-office successes as The Terminator, Platoon and The Last Emperor. Films with which he was involved won 13 Oscars, including nine for The Last Emperor alone.

He was essentially a businessman who put up money for films rather than a hands-on creative producer such as David Puttnam. As an independent he tended to pick up projects, often low-budget, which the major studios had turned down. Although he had his flops his films were estimated to have grossed more than $1.5 billion.

John Daly was born into a working-class family in southeast London in 1937. His father was a dockworker and former professional boxer. He left school at 15 and took a variety of jobs, working as a teaboy and a waiter in the Merchant Navy and selling insurance. He also tried acting and journalism.

A chance meeting with David Hemmings (obituary, Dec 5, 2003), who had just taken the lead role in Antonioni’s “swinging London” film Blow-Up, led to the formation in 1967 of Hemdale, a company which started as a talent agency before moving into records, television and film production and distribution. Hemmings’s involvement was brief, ending four years later when he sold his share.

Hemdale continued under Daly and among its diverse activities were managing the rock bands Yes and Black Sabbath, taking over a TV company, acquiring the worldwide stage rights to the Lionel Bart musical Oliver!, putting on a London stage production of Grease starring Richard Gere and acquiring a chain of betting shops.

One of its first cinema ventures was helping to finance Melody (1971, also known as S.W.A.L.K. — sealed with a loving kiss), which launched David Puttnam as a producer and was scripted by the future director Alan Parker. Hemdale went on to back Murphy’s War, with Peter O’Toole, Images, directed by Robert Altman in the Irish Republic, the ghost story The Amazing Mr Blunden and Ken Russell’s rock opera Tommy, starring The Who.

By the beginning of the 1980s Daly had moved his operation to the US. He got off to a slow start with Cattle Annie and the Little Britches, a western with Burt Lancaster, and Carbon Copy, a George Segal comedy, and came horribly unstuck with the pirate spoof Yellowbeard.

Although made in Hollywood it was a mainly British affair, written by Graham Chapman, of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and Peter Cook and with a cast including Chapman, Cook, Marty Feldman, Eric Idle and John Cleese. It was panned by the critics and was a box-office disaster.

It was quickly followed, however, by The Terminator (1984), a big commercial hit which confirmed Arnold Schwarzenegger as a Hollywood star. Hemdale also backed two early films from the director Oliver Stone, the Vietnam War drama Platoon (1986), which picked up three Oscars, and Salvador. Daly’s financial involvement in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987), an epic take on 20th-century Chinese history, completed a golden period.

Daly demonstrated his willingness to back projects outside the commercial mainstream with Hidden Agenda (1990), a typically robust attack by Ken Loach on British policy in Northern Ireland. Loach failed to get financing in Britain and but for Hemdale the film might not have been made. It did much to revive Loach’s career after years of frustration.

In 1995 Hemdale Film Corporation was taken over by Orion Pictures and Daly moved into other ventures, heading Global Assets Entertainment Corp and setting up Greenhills Films, a European-based production company. Since 2003 he had been chairman and chief executive of Film and Music Entertainment Inc.

After a long career as a producer, Daly had latterly tried his hand at writing and directing. He met with only modest success, though The Aryan Couple (2004), starring Martin Landau as a German-Jewish industrialist forced to lose his business to the Nazis, won awards at four US film festivals. Daly was working on a new film at the time of his death.

He is survived by three sons and a daughter.

John Daly, film producer, was born on July 16, 1937. He died of cancer on October 31, 2008, aged 71