Michael White: Much-loved theatre and film producer whose hits included Oh! Calcutta! and The Rocky Horror Show

Theatre house lights across the West End were dimmed for two minutes on Wednesday evening in tribute to Michael White. Known to friends and colleagues as "Chalky", White made immense contributions behind the scenes in producing musicals, television programmes and films during a career of more than half a century. The actress Greta Scacchi described him as "the most famous person you've never heard of."

White produced more than 100 shows for the stage, including West End debuts of The Rocky Horror Show, Oh! Calcutta! and A Chorus Line, and was the producer for films including the classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail and My Dinner With Andre.

He was born in Glasgow in 1936, the son of a glove-maker. Aged seven and suffering from asthma, he was sent to an international boarding school near St Moritz in Switzerland, to improve his health. Recalling his lonely time at the school, he said, "Just as I learnt French fluently the doctor said 'Michael should go higher up' so I was moved to German-speaking Switzerland and then I had to start all over again."

His first exposure to theatre arrived through a summer job he got "by accident" after graduating from the Sorbonne. That in turn led to work with the impresario Sir Peter Daubeny as his right-hand man on the World Theatre seasons in London.

White's first production of his own, The Connection, flopped. Set in New York and based on a group of addicts in a loft waiting for a drug deal, the production did not fit its venue. As White explained, "By doing it in a West End Edwardian theatre it had completely the wrong feel to it."

His first theatrical hit came in 1970 with Oh! Calcutta!, the avant-garde revue on sexual themes created by Kenneth Tynan which had already had some success off-Broadway. With its nudity, and sketches by a host of contributors, including Samuel Beckett and John Lennon, it ran for more than 3,900 performances in London.

The Rocky Horror Show, now a camp cult classic, opened in London at the Theatre Upstairs of the Royal Court Theatre in June 1973 to an audience of 63 people. Brian Thomson, the show's designer, said, "If anyone had said, 'this thing will be around in 35 or 40 years' you would have been howled down... It just sort of took off in a way that nobody was able to comprehend or understand."

White's stroke of genius was to move the production to a run-down old cinema on Kings Road, the Kings Road Theatre, where it ran non-stop for six years until 1979, when it transferred to the Comedy Theatre in the West End.

Despite the production's enormous success, critically and financially, White would later admit, without regret, that he had sold his share to the rights of Rocky Horror in a haze of drugs. The film adaptation, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, released two years after the stage debut, took the phenomenon worldwide and it continues to have a cult following to this day.

White didn't just bring people to the theatre and cinema as audiences; he also brought the people of the stage and film together at legendary parties which he took delight in photographing. For the opening night of A Chorus Line (1976) it was not only the cast but the whole audience who were invited to the after-show party, at a reported cost of some £100,000. As a hoarder of ephemera and photographs, White estimated that he had some 30,000 of his own snaps of celebrities of stage and screen.

But paradoxically, in his appearance on Desert Island Discs in 1996 he admitted to Sue Lawley, "Sometimes there are first nights which are just fantastic the moment the curtain goes up. Chorus Line was one. And then there are first nights where you just want to crawl away... You don't know what to say or do."

By 2005 the partying and backing of productions successful and unsuccessful had taken its toll: he suffered a heart attack and was declared bankrupt. Having bounced back, White was presented with a lifetime achievement award by Kate Moss at last year's Olivier Awards.

A documentary about White's life, The Last Impresario, directed by Gracie Otto, premiered at the BFI Film Festival in October 2013. "When I first said to Michael that I wanted to make a documentary he laughed," Otto told The Independent. "I didn't blame him – I was a 22-year-old woman and really knew nothing about his track record.

"But it was the man that fascinated me. When we were shooting the film he always wanted to focus on his work, his legacy, and shied away from anything personal. But to tell the story of his work I had to talk to people – so many people – and the true picture of Chalky began to emerge.

"Everyone loved him. Without exception. He was an extraordinary man, willing to take risks to produce the new and exciting in theatre, dance and film. Essentially I made The Last Impresario for Michael. It was my gift to him to say thank you for just being himself. The fact that it has been seen around the world means that he will always be remembered, and that gives me some comfort now that he has gone."

Michael Simon White, theatre and film producer: born Glasgow 16 January 1936; married 1965 Sarah Hillsdon (divorced 1973; one daughter, two sons), 1985 Louise Moores (one son); died 7 March 2016.