James Ferman, the controversial film censor, dies aged 72

The former chief film censor James Ferman, who slowly liberalised regulation of the cinema during the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, has died at the age of 72.

He died suddenly on Christmas Eve after being admitted to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, London, suffering from acute pneumonia, his widow, Monica, said yesterday.

Mr Ferman retired as director of the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) in 1999 after a 24-year tenure, during which he was frequently denounced by right-wing commentators for being too lenient. Among his most controversial decisions, he passed David Cronenberg's gory tale Crash; the recent cinematic rendering of Nabokov's novel Lolita; and Martin Scorsese's revisionist epic The Last Temptation of Christ.

One of his final controversies was to grant a 15 certificate to the Steven Spielberg film Saving Private Ryan, despite its violent depiction of the Normandy landings. "We felt that it told the truth about war and we didn't want war glamorised for teenagers," he said.

Mr Ferman also demanded 24 cuts in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom before he would give it the PG certificate allowing children to see it. He was particularly keen to excise scenes of violence, especially of a sexual nature, and moved to regulate so-called video nasties.

Overall, however, Mr Ferman oversaw a reduction in the amount of cuts made to films before they were awarded a classification. In 1974, when he took up his job, the board of censors ordered changes to 40 per cent of films; during his last full year in charge in 1998 the proportion of cuts had fallen to 3.6 per cent.

"Having suffered my own share of heavy-handed censorship as a TV director, I am proud to have transformed the BBFC from a board of censors to a board of classification," he said on his retirement.

He described himself as "a film lover as well as a film buff" but said he would not miss the "callousness" of contemporary films and videos, or pornography, of which he said he had seen more than enough.