Film producer and distributor; Born August 10, 1920; Died December 5, 2007.

Tony Tenser, who has died aged 87, began his showbiz career as a cinema manager, worked as a publicist - devising the term "sex kitten" for Brigitte Bardot - and went on to produce an amazingly diverse selection of films in the 1960s and 1970s.

His first production company, Compton Films, was an offshoot of the private cinema club he set up in London's Old Compton Street in 1960 to get round censorship restrictions. It produced sexploitation documentaries and dramas, but also financed Roman Polanski's first English-language films, Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-Sac (1966).

Born in London's east end in 1920, Samuel Anthony Tenser was one of seven children of Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants. He joined the ABC cinema chain as a trainee manager and was reputedly promoted when he reported his boss for claiming wages for non-existent staff.

He worked as publicity manager for Miracle Films, a small distributor specialising in European titles, and left to set up his own company with Michael Klinger, a strip-club owner who wanted to get into films. Tenser got to know him after recruiting his strippers to demonstrate against a Brigitte Bardot movie he was promoting for Miracle, on the grounds that it was taking away their business. It was a comedy called En Effeuillant la Marguerite (1956), which means While Plucking the Daisy, though Tenser somehow managed to translate it as Mam'selle Striptease.

Compton churned out cheap exploitation films such as Naked as Nature Intended (1961), but there were occasional forays upmarket. A Study in Terror (1965) showed considerable imagination in combining Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper.

After splitting with Klinger, Tenser formed Tigon, which became one of British cinema's most important production and distribution companies. Tigon made a wide range of films, but its most important contribution to British cinema was in the field of horror. It briefly challenged the supremacy of Hammer, with Tenser again showing his capacity for lurid titles. In 1968 alone, Tigon released Curse of the Crimson Altar, with Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee; The Blood Beast Terror, with Peter Cushing; and Witchfinder General.

It was Tenser who found the original novel for Witchfinder General and developed it as a film, with Vincent Price playing the seventeenth-century witch-hunter Matthew Hopkins. The censors demanded cuts, critics hated it and the public were not much more enthusiastic, but it is now widely acknowledged as a masterpiece of British cinema.

Tenser himself shot extra nude scenes, which feature in some versions. He believed you could not go far wrong with sex and nudity, though an attempt to relaunch Norman Wisdom's career in the sex comedy What's Good for the Goose (1969) was not a great success.

Tenser was reputedly the template for Roy Kinnear's character in the 1975 comedy Eskimo Nell - an executive who runs BUM Films and makes wildly different versions of the film, also called Eskimo Nell, for different audiences.

In the 1970s Tenser moved to the Lancashire town of Southport with his third wife, Diane, who was 27 years his junior, and began a businesses in property development and selling wicker chairs. He is survived by Diane; by his second wife, Christine; and by four children from the two marriages. By Brian Pendreigh