[this is taken from The Guardian:

Simon Channing Williams
Genial producer with the dependability that allowed the talents of his collaborator Mike Leigh free rein
Wednesday 15 April 2009

The film producer Simon Channing Williams, who has died of cancer aged 63, founded Thin Man Films in 1988 with the director Mike Leigh and produced all Leigh's films for the next two decades. And with another independent production company, Potboiler Productions, which he formed in 2000 with Gail Egan, he produced seven feature films including The Constant Gardener, starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz.

Channing Williams, who de-hyphenated his own name some years ago, was the classic "can do" type of producer, unflappable and generous-spirited, an uncompromising defender and protector of his directors and writers, who, in the 1970s, had come through the ranks at BBC Television, where he worked with rising star directors including Stephen Frears, Mike Newell, Michael Apted, James McTaggart, Alvin Rakoff, Jack Gold and Leigh. His last BBC assignment was as first assistant director on Leigh's Grown-Ups (1980). An important collaborative friendship was formed as Leigh recognised Channing Williams's organisational abilities on the location shoot in Canterbury, where two sets of neighbours - played by Lindsay Duncan, Sam Kelly, Philip Davis and Lesley Manville - were embroiled in a farcical staircase sequence with Brenda Blethyn's glorious loose cannon of an unwanted relative.

The middle son of Major-General John Channing-Williams, who was awarded the DSO for gallantry at the Normandy landings, and his wife, Margaret Blatchford, Simon enjoyed a career at the BBC and in films that was as big a surprise to his family as it was to him. He was educated at St Piran's prep school, Maidenhead, Berkshire, and then Stowe school, Buckinghamshire, where he acted in school plays and was secretary of rugby, cricket and hockey, with special responsibility for choosing the venue for post-match refreshments.

Taking a job as an assistant stage manager at the Windsor Rep, he was told by the veteran artistic director John Counsell that he would never make an actor, so he joined BBC Television at White City as a press operator in the captions department. He transferred to the drama department as a call boy, rapidly progressing to third assistant director. Leaving the BBC as an established first assistant director, he joined Anglia TV and then Tony Palmer as an associate producer on Wagner (1983), starring Richard Burton as the composer, and featuring the sole screen appearance of Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud together.

His last assignment as a "first" was on Hugh Hudson's Greystoke in 1984, and that year he also produced Palmer's superb Puccini for television. By the time Leigh was ready and able to make his first feature film since his debut with Bleak Moments in 1971 - the British film industry having decamped thereafter, in effect, to television - Channing Williams was on hand to mastermind negotiations with Film Four International, British Screen and Portman.

The resultant movie, High Hopes (1988), was another "tricky neighbours" scenario demanding precise use of locations in the King's Cross area and an understanding, which Channing Williams had intuitively developed, of Leigh's unusual working methods, starting with no script and constructing a film through character research and improvisation.

Each man knowing that he had found his destined collaborator, the pair formed Thin Man - at a time when both were fairly corpulent - and embarked on a series of brilliant and distinctive productions: the hilarious Life is Sweet (1990), the pivotal Naked (1993), the emotionally gut-wrenching Secrets and Lies (1996), the proto-postfeminist, daringly structured Career Girls (1997), the glorious Gilbert and Sullivan extravaganza Topsy-Turvy (1999), the triple-stranded low-key epic All or Nothing (2002), the abortionist drama Vera Drake (2004), with Imelda Staunton's award-winning performance, and Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), starring the irrepressible Sally Hawkins.

There is no question that Leigh's talent was fully unleashed in large part due to the rock-like solidity provided by Channing Williams. But the producer was dogged by illness in recent years and, at the cast and crew screening of Happy-Go-Lucky, paid characteristically unsentimental tribute to the staff at the Royal Marsden who cared for him. You would not necessarily have known that he was thanking them on his own behalf.

The Constant Gardener (2005) for Potboiler, directed by Fernando Meirelles, was one of a recent batch of Hollywood "issue" films - others were Stephen Gaghan's Syriana and Paul Haggis's Crash, which voiced a new groundswell against blockbuster and marshmallow. Weisz, who won the best actress Oscar, played the wife of a British diplomat (Fiennes) who is threatening to expose pharmaceutical companies for drug-testing on Africans. During filming, cast and crew, led by Channing Williams, decided to set up The Constant Gardener Trust, starting with all the location fees, to improve sanitation and education in Kibera, Nairobi, the largest slum of sub-Saharan Africa. Water tanks and toilet facilities were installed, community projects started, and a secondary school in the desert town of Loiyangalani, 600km north of Nairobi, will be completed by the end of this year.

Channing Williams was presented with one of Kenya's highest awards, the Order of the Grand Warrior, in February 2007. Also through Potboiler, his other key films as producer, or executive producer, included Douglas McGrath's Nicholas Nickleby (2002), Lou Pepe and Keith Fulton's Brothers of the Head (2005), starring Jonathan Pryce and Harry and Luke Treadaway, and Meirelles's Blindness (2008), starring Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo.

He also ran two pubs in Newbury, Berkshire, the Five Bells and the Carpenters Arms, and at one time ran a film catering company. He was a passionate angler, loved the Scilly Isles - where he made Clive Rees's When the Whales Came (1989), based on Michael Morpurgo's book - and latterly lived in Penzance. He was married three times, first to the make-up artist Shirley Jones (now deceased), second to Dorothy King and then to Annie Long, a costume designer. He is survived by Annie and their two sons; his twin daughters and son by Dorothy; and five grandchildren.

Collaborator Mike Leigh pays tribute to Channing Williams:

Simon's heart was as massive as his famous physical bulk. So was his charming, jovial, genial, impish sense of humour. He was a natural-born producer - a great leader, always an enabler, a protector; never a dictator or an interferer. Infinitely generous, he spent his life doing things for people, and bringing out the best in everybody. He was the ultimate fixer, and a phenomenal organiser. He relished the impossible challenge, and loved the cut-and-thrust of negotiations, at which he was a genius. He had no pretensions to be a storyteller, always understanding the symbiotic relationship between the producer and the creative team. But he thoroughly understood film, technically and artistically, and his taste and insight were always impeccable, incisive and constructive.

He would hate all this praise. He always talked about "just getting on with it", which is how he dealt with his spreading multiple cancer over nearly five years - quietly and with no fuss. He insisted on working almost until the end. Finally forced to give in, he faced death openly and with characteristic good humour. I saw him at home in Penzance a fortnight ago. As we parted company for the last time, we shared our favourite running gag. We always disagreed as to which of us was the organ-grinder, and which the monkey. We each claimed to be the monkey, but I can now state beyond all doubt that Simon was the consummate organ-grinder.

Quentin Curtis writes: Politeness has never been a quality much valued, still less practised, in Hollywood. When Simon Channing Williams bustled, spouting a stream of gentle salutations and apologies, into my boss at MGM's office some time in 2000, the suits in power could have been forgiven for expecting the worst. For Simon was the antithesis of the LA movie mogul. His uniform was a baggy sweater and pair of timeworn slacks. His portly figure owed more to heartily enjoyed lunches than the rigours of the gym. His old-fashioned good manners, calmness and understatement were a world away from the hype and bluster with which the town conducts business.

And yet this rumpled Englishman was arguably the most effective British producer of his generation. He had come to talk to MGM about The Constant Gardener, the start of a journey that would lead, after his overcoming many obstacles, and finding another studio, to one of the most acclaimed films of its decade.

There are many ways of producing a movie. Simon's, as I observed on the two MGM films, Nicholas Nickleby and De-Lovely, with which I worked as an executive with him, and The Constant Gardener, which he talked about making with his friend Bingham Ray, head of the MGM-owned United Artists, was an unusual mixture of mildness and tenacity. The Constant Gardener for a long time was kept alive only by the force of his belief in it. When Mike Newell dropped out of directing it to take on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, it looked as if the project was dead. But Simon revealed his master plan to me. "I'm going to send a handwritten letter to Fernando Meirelles," he declared. Frankly, it didn't seem a very likely strategy in the age of the curt email and the bellowed phone call, the language Hollywood agents respond to. But in Simon's hands it worked.

Imelda Staunton, after winning the best actress Bafta for Vera Drake in 2005, paid tribute to Simon's persistence in raising funds for such a difficult project. That, indeed, was one of his greatest gifts: an uncanny ability to budget a film at the right level and find the sources of investment, however improbable. He was a master of the nuts and bolts of production, the vital practicalities.

Producing a film is in some ways akin to leading an army, and nobody led with more unassuming good humour than Simon. Typically, he played down his extraordinary logistical prowess and mastery of the set. When I told him that I looked forward to making a film we were due to work on as I reckoned it would be an education to work along side him, he genially demurred: "I don't know about that. It mainly consists of eating very large breakfasts."

He had to withdraw from that film when the doctors' prognosis for his cancer became terminal. Up till then, it had been hard to believe he was as ill as he was. He was heroically undiminished, as engaged and energetic as ever – the same mane of silver hair, gentle pause as he measured his replies, and glint of amusement in the spectacles when he homed in on a plan of action. When he was forced to withdraw from our project he did so with plain-spoken practicality, devoid of self-pity.

No one who achieved as much as Simon in the intractable movie world can have done it by being entirely meek. For all the rare altruism, there was clearly a toughness, born of both belief and principle. He could sound testy when talking of those who had failed him, though never intolerant. But oddly the only indication I ever saw of anger in him was in a farcical story he told me about a bust-up he had at JFK airport security shortly after 9/11. After his repeated attempts to walk through had been met with loud alarms, he had exasperatedly removed his trousers. Not a conventional producer or man - but a great one, all the same.

• Simon Channing Williams, film producer, born 10 June 1945; died 11 April 2009