Film and television producer; Born April 24 1938; Died October 11 2008.

Mark Shivas, who has died of cancer aged 70, was a former head of BBC Drama and BBC Films, before becoming an independent producer. His television credits include such landmarks as The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970).

He became increasingly involved in films in the 1980s, producing Moonlighting (1982) for Channel 4 Films and A Private Function (1984), starring Michael Palin, for George Harrison's HandMade Films.

When the BBC launched its own film company, Shivas was recruited to run it, and among the projects he backed was Small Faces (1996), Gillies MacKinnon's semi-autobiographical account of growing up in Glasgow in the 1960s. His association with Scotland continued as executive producer on MacKinnon's Regeneration (1997), a First World War drama that recreated the battlefields of the Western Front in a field outside Airdrie, and Michael Winterbottom's Jude (1996), which had central Edinburgh doubling for Oxford.

Born in Surrey in 1938, Shivas studied law at Oxford, founded the magazine Movie and wrote about film for the New York Times. He joined Granada Television in 1964 producing and directing factual programmes and presenting the Cinema programme.

He switched to the BBC in 1969, and The Six Wives of Henry VIII was one of the first projects he produced. It earned him a Bafta award. At the BBC he worked with many leading writers and directors of the day, including Dennis Potter on Casanova (1971), Jack Rosenthal and Alan Parker on The Evacuees (1975) and Frederic Raphael on The Glittering Prizes (1976).

He spent much of the 1980s working freelance and won an American Emmy award for the children's series The Storyteller (1988), scripted by Anthony Minghella and involving the creations of legendary puppeteer Jim Henson. Shivas and Henson worked together again on the Roald Dahl adaptation The Witches in 1990.

Shivas returned to the BBC in 1988 as head of drama and was reunited with Minghella on the ghostly romantic drama Truly Madly Deeply (1990). It was made primarily for television, but its success in cinemas belatedly persuaded the BBC that it should follow Channel 4's lead and set up a film company. Shivas became its first head in 1993. During the next five years he was executive producer on 20 films, including Priest (1994), An Awfully Big Adventure (1995) and three films with MacKinnon, concluding with Hideous Kinky (1998).

The number of writers and directors who returned to work with Shivas again and again reflected his popularity within the industry. In 1997 he set up a company called Perpetual Motion and made the BBC mini-series Cambridge Spies (2003) and the film I Capture the Castle (2003). More recently he had been involved in setting up Headline Pictures and had been developing a film of the Peter Pan sequel Peter Pan in Scarlet.

He is survived by his partner, Karun Thakar.