Peter Whitehead, who has died aged 82, was an unsung hero of counterculture cinema whose films captured the shifting tides of the Swinging Sixties; he was best known for Charlie is my Darling, a grainy black and white documentary of a chaotic 1965 Rolling Stones tour of Ireland, and Tonight Let’s All Make Love in London, both of which became cult classics.

More handsome than most of his subjects, Whitehead was rumoured to have had affairs with numerous beauties of the era, including Nico, Nathalie Delon, Niki de Saint Phalle and Bianca Jagger. He had eight children by various women, including four daughters from his marriage to Dido Goldsmith, daughter of Teddy Goldsmith and niece of Sir James. He claimed in a 2007 interview with The Sunday Telegraph to have been married “something like” four times, but it seems the actual tally was three.

At the end of the 1960s, however, Whitehead largely turned his back on film, and set himself up as a falconer, becoming so expert that for 10 years he ran a falcon-breeding programme in Saudi Arabia founded by King Faisal’s son, Prince Khalid Al-Faisal.

The son of a plumber, Peter Lorrimer Whitehead was born on January 8 1937 and brought up in poverty in the Lake District and in London. He was 13 when he was sent off to Ashville College, a public school in Harrogate, under a post-war Labour government scheme to give bright, disadvantaged children a leg up. There he captained the rugby team, became the school organist and ended up convinced that he could always get by but did not belong anywhere.