Perhaps if he had not been such a nice man, of such uncompromising taste and an incorrigible socialist, he could have enjoyed a more flamboyant and financially profitable career in the film business.
Plaschkes's father, a butcher, came from Bratislava and his mother from Budapest, but they had settled in Vienna by the time Otto was born - perhaps in 1929, though he always suspected his mother had added a year to his age to qualify him for the kindertransport with which he arrived in England in 1939. He was temporarily adopted by a family in Liverpool.
Luckier than most Jewish refugees, he was subsequently reunited with his parents and his older sister, and grew up in Salisbury, Wiltshire, where his father established a sausage casing business. At Bishop Wordsworth school, his teachers included William Golding, and his contemporaries later claimed to recognise themselves in Golding's novel, The Lord Of The Flies. All agreed that Otto was the original of Piggy. The character would have been right, and Golding never denied the claim.
Plaschkes went on to read history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and later took an education diploma at Wadham College, Oxford, but he had already discovered the cinema.
This was largely thanks to the Cambridge Film Society, which had hit a high point in its membership and programming under the chairmanship of Roger Few. Its undergraduate committee included Tom Pevsner, later producer of the James Bond series and a constant friend to Plaschkes, and Michael (later Lord) Birkett. Another lasting influence from this time was Lindsay Anderson and the Free Cinema movement, with their watchword, "an attitude is a style and a style is an attitude".
Thus enthused, Plaschkes wrote to Sir Michael Balcon, who took him on at Ealing Studios as a runner. He was soon promoted to production assistant, though he also worked in the cutting room - and anywhere else where he could satisfy his passion to know everything about film craft. At Ealing, he established some lifelong friendships, including the producer Anthony Havelock-Allen, and the director Jack Clayton, whose biography Plaschkes recently wrote for the new Dictionary Of National Biography.
In 1960 he was assistant director to fellow-Viennese Otto Preminger on Exodus, and, in 1962, production assistant on Lawrence Of Arabia. By this time, he had already embarked as a producer in his own right with a film for the Children's Film Foundation, Bungala Boys (1961).
Plaschkes found his true place with the 60s renaissance of British cinema, starting as co-producer of Georgy Girl (1966), directed by Silvio Narizzano, with James Mason, Alan Bates and Lynn Redgrave, who took over the role after her sister Vanessa withdrew from the project. After that came The Bofors Gun (1968), directed by Jack Gold from John McGrath's play, and an American production, Larry Peerce's A Separate Peace (1972), for Paramount.
As executive producer for the American Film Theatre, Plaschkes produced Peter Hall's film of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming (1974); Bertolt Brecht's Galileo (1975), directed by Joseph Losey, who had directed the original stage version in New York in 1947; Pinter's appreciative direction of Simon Gray's Butley (1976), with Alan Bates and Jessica Tandy; and, perhaps most notably, Lindsay Anderson's adaptation of David Storey's In Celebration (1975). Jack Gold's screen version of David Garnett's The Sailor's Return (1978) is one of the most underestimated films of its time.
Plaschkes's most commercially successful film was Hopscotch (1980), a civilised thriller, directed by Ronald Neame and teaming Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson. His most recent production was Shadey (1985), directed by Philip Saville from a script by Snoo Wilson, with Antony Sher as an eccentric trans-sexual with the ability to project telepathic film images. Notable television productions included two directed by Desmond Davis, The Sign Of Four (1986) and Doggin' Around (1994), and another Sherlock Holmes adaptation, Douglas Hickox's The Hound Of The Baskervilles (1984).
A brief, unlikely episode in Plaschkes's career was as head of production, from 1984 to 1986, for the buccaneering Cannon Productions, under its colourful Israeli founders Menachem Golan and Yoram Globus. He was also, for a while, an inspiring teacher at the National Film School. At the time of his death, he was working energetically on three new projects for the cinema.
As a conscientious member of the American Academy of Film and Television Arts, Plaschkes went earlier this week to a West End preview theatre to judge the Swedish film nominated for the Oscar for best foreign language film, Kay Pollak's As It Is In Heaven, the story of a talented conductor struck down by a heart attack. Since he had already seen the second film to be screened that night, the French Les Choristes, he left the cinema after watching the Pollak, only to suffer his own fatal heart attack minutes afterwards.
Plaschkes met his future wife, Louise Stein, a woman who shared his artistic interests, particularly in opera, at an end-of-shooting party for The Homecoming. They married in 1975. She survives him, with their only daughter.
· Otto Plaschkes, film producer, born September 13 1929; died February 14 2005
