Christopher Malcolm, who has died of cancer aged 67, played Brad Majors in the original production of The Rocky Horror Show in 1973 and, as his life as an actor started to overlap with an interest in producing the shows themselves, he became, after co-producing the West End revival of Rocky Horror in 1990, the executive in charge of all subsequent worldwide productions.
His death came just a few days after his latest project, the revival of Oh What a Lovely War at Stratford East, opened to enthusiastic notices, probably sealing a West End transfer. The way the show turned out was a good example of the kind of creative partnerships he enjoyed and nurtured throughout his career. For more than 30 years, he worked as an "insider" producing link between such London fringe venues as the Half Moon, Stratford East and the King's Head, and the commercial sector, collaborating with talents of his own generation such as Richard O'Brien (the Rocky Horror author), Simon Callow, Steven Berkoff and Sir Howard Panter, now joint chief executive of Britain's largest theatre conglomerate, the Ambassador Theatre Group.
He maintained his acting career, best known on television as Saffy's gay father Justin in Absolutely Fabulous, and he made several notable films, from Bruce Beresford's The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972), with Barry Humphries, to Warren Beatty's Reds (1981) and Jim Henson's Labyrinth (1986). His last television appearance was as Daphne du Maurier's publisher, Nelson Doubleday, in Daphne (2007) on BBC2.
But his life was really the theatre. He was born in Aberdeen, the second of four children of a farmer (and sometime insurance salesman), William Malcolm, and his wife, Paddy English, an amateur theatre enthusiast. When his parents took the young family to Canada on an emigration £10 scheme, the irrepressible Paddy became renowned as the woman who brought pantomime to British Columbia. They settled on a farm in Vernon, BC, and the children were raised, effectively, as farmhands. Chris dropped out of his course at the University of British Columbia to help build the new Powerhouse theatre in Vernon and started acting. After an unhappy love affair, at the age of 19 he simply got on a boat and came back to Britain to live with his grandmother in Elsenham, Essex.
She used to play bridge with the mother of the Royal Shakespeare Company's associate director John Barton, so an audition was arranged, and Chris played small parts in Stratford-upon-Avon and London between 1966 and 1968, becoming firm friends with the actor siblings Frances and Andy de la Tour, who semi-adopted him.
He acted at Charles Marowitz's Open Space in 1968-69 and began a significant association with the Royal Court in 1970, when he appeared in Peter Gill's production of Michael Weller's Cancer alongside Martin Shaw, Al Mancini and David Healy. In Cancer, later re-titled Moonchildren, a group of college seniors shared an apartment in the mid-1960s, very much talking 'bout their generation. Malcolm's background meant he was easy in American, Scottish or Canadian inflections, and this, with his robust physical presence and open demeanour, made him ideal casting for the "Americana" of Jim Sharman's productions of Sam Shepard plays, and Rocky Horror, in the Court's Theatre Upstairs.
His first show as a producer was the aptly named , alas, Disaster, by O'Brien, at the ICA in 1978, in which a group of B-movie stereotypes were stranded in the Bermuda Triangle. But he immediately co-produced a smoky Half Moon revival of Pal Joey starring Siân Phillips and Denis Lawson in the West End, gathering momentum with Nell Dunn's glorious Steaming (from Stratford East) in 1981, which played for two years at the Comedy (now the Harold Pinter) and toured worldwide, and Julie Walters and Brian Cox in Terrence McNally's Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, also at the Comedy, in 1986, a sexy romance played out by a short-order cook and a waitress.
Malcolm was literally thrown off his stride and seriously injured when knocked off his Norton motorbike at Vauxhall, south London, in 1987. He spent five years with a fractured femur in his right leg, but a chance meeting with a Swiss surgeon led to a successful series of operations and a fused knee, though he always walked with a pronounced limp thereafter.
Undaunted, he carried on with notable presentations of the work of Berkoff, a series which had begun with Tim Roth in Metamorphosis at the Mermaid in 1986, and brought Decadence and Greek to the Wyndham's in 1988-89. The Rocky Horror producing saga began for him at the Piccadilly theatre in 1990, in a production that eventually succeeded on Broadway in 2000. He took care of the National's transfer of Alan Bennett's Single Spies to the Queen's theatre in 1988 (Callow directed one of the plays and appeared in both) and co-produced Dusty Hughes's A Slip of the Tongue at the Shaftesbury in 1992, in which John Malkovich gave a blistering performance as a Czech dissident writer embroiled in a political sex comedy.
Other credits included Callow's revival of The Pajama Game at the Birmingham Rep and the Victoria Palace in London in 1999, with designs by the American painter Frank Stella and choreography by David Bintley; popular money-spinners – Footloose the Musical (2003) and Flashdance the Musical (2008); Berkoff's tremendous Messiah at the Old Vic in 2003; and the UK tour of Our House, using music by Madness, in 2008.
One sister predeceased him. He is survived by two brothers and another sister, and by his wife, the actor Judy Lloyd, with whom he lived for 40 years. The couple had three children, one of them the playwright and screenwriter Morgan Lloyd Malcolm; they, and one grandson, survive him, too.
• Christopher Malcolm, actor and producer, born 19 August 1946; died 15 February 2014
