Film producer; Born August 15, 1942; Died August 12, 2009.

Clive Parsons, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 66, was an Englishman who played an important role in the history of Scottish film, as producer of the landmark Bill Forsyth comedies Gregory's Girl (1981) and Comfort and Joy (1984).

He was also the key individual in getting the violent Borstal movie Scum (1979) into cinemas after the BBC banned the original 1977 TV version. Parsons read about the controversy in the press and proposed that the entire film be remade as a cinema movie, which it was. It is now widely acknowledged as a classic.

His other films include the punk rock musical Breaking Glass (1980), Lindsay Anderson's Britannia Hospital (1982), Franco Zeffirelli's Tea with Mussolini (1999) and Callas Forever (2002), and Half Light (2006), with Demi Moore and Henry Ian Cusick.

He was born Anthony Simon Clive Parsons in Woking, Surrey. A gifted scholar, when he was just 17 he wrote the textbook A Basic Latin Vocabulary (1960), which is still in print half a century later.

Parsons read law at Oxford University, qualified as a barrister and entered the film industry via the legal department of Paramount Pictures in London. Subsequently, he moved to Warner Bros., where he was head of business affairs for Europe and where he met Davina Belling, who was to become his long-term production partner.

In 1971, they set up Film and General Productions, initially to provide seed money for producers. Early projects which they helped finance include the Confessions comedies with Robin Askwith.

They became increasingly involved in production themselves and their first film as producers was Inserts (1975), an X-certificate drama about the porn business in the 1930s, starring Richard Dreyfuss. Continuing the sex theme was Rosie Dixon Night Nurse (1978), one of the sex comedies that the Confessions series popularised.

Parsons became involved in Scum after reading a newspaper report that the BBC had commissioned it but was refusing to show it. "I remember a sentence which sparked my curiosity," he said, "likening Scum to a James Cagney Warner Bros movie.

"There was this whole notion whereby a guy enters a prison situation, sees the injustice going on, does nothing and then decides to take control. And it did seem like a terrific theme for a commercial movie."

Under the terms of writer Roy Minton's contract, if the BBC failed to broadcast Scum within a certain time, the rights would revert to him. So Minton, director Alan Clarke and star Ray Winstone made the whole thing again, as a feature film, with Parsons and Belling.

Bill Forsyth had already written and directed one very low-budget feature before he linked up with Parsons and Belling. That Sinking Feeling (1979) was made in his native Glasgow with amateurs, including holidaying electrician John Gordon Sinclair. It reputedly cost only £6000 and went into the record books as the cheapest British film to get an international release.

But Forsyth's career really took off with Gregory's Girl, in which Sinclair played a gawky schoolboy with a crush on a classmate (Dee Hepburn), who just happens to be the best player in the school football team.

Forsyth is undoubtedly one of Scotland's greatest film-makers, but he has sometimes seemed to need others to help direct his vision and creativity. Film critic and historian Alexander Walker argued in his book National Heroes: British Cinema in the Seventies and Eighties (1985) that "Gregory's Girl placed Forsyth's talents in the steadier production hands of Clive Parsons and Davina Belling".

Producer David Puttnam subsequently steered Forsyth on to the international stage with his third feature Local Hero (1983), starring Hollywood legend Burt Lancaster. But Forsyth was reunited with Parsons and Belling on Comfort and Joy, a darker comedy-drama, with a more melancholy tone.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of those early Bill Forsyth films in providing experience for a generation of film crew and helping establish the industry and infrastructure that exists in Scotland today.

Parsons and Belling had a tie-up with Kings Road, a major American company, and Parsons was president of the company for three years in the 1980s, during which time the company's films included the Steve Martin comedy All of Me (1984) and the minor classic The Big Easy (1986).

Parsons and Belling were also involved in television, most notably children's television. They produced The Queen's Nose (1995-2003), a comedy series about a magic coin, and The Giblet Boys, (2005), for which they won the Bafta award for best children's drama.

Parsons is survived by his wife, Margaret, and by two daughters.

BRIAN PENDREIGH