William K. Everson; Curator Rescued Old American Films

William K. Everson, an independent American film curator who was once described as the “impresario of old movies,” died in his New York City apartment Sunday after a long battle with cancer. He was 67.

Everson, a tireless and resourceful collector, amassed a personal library of more than 4,000 films. His collection, considered one of the largest private archives of its kind in the world, has been credited with saving many old American films--particularly silent movies--from being lost forever.

“What mattered to him was passing on the knowledge, the love and the experience of seeing the films,” said film historian Leonard Maltin, who described Everson as a mentor and friend.

Everson wrote more than 16 books and innumerable articles on cinema. Over the years, he taught at New York University, the city’s School of Visual Arts and the New School for Social Research. His students and admirers included Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee and Stephen Sondheim.

Born in England in 1929, Everson came to the United States at the age of 21 and instantly became obsessed with movies.

“As soon as I got off the boat, I was confronted by 42nd Street!” he once told an interviewer. “Row upon row of marquees! And the first marquee I saw had Chaplin’s ‘City Lights’ and Von Sternberg’s ‘The Scarlet Empress,’ neither of which I’d seen in England, so I was off like a shot!”

Working as a publicist, he began collecting films at a time when studios were lax in preserving movies from the ‘20s and ‘30s. He bought films that were about to be destroyed by distributors, and sometimes even “liberated” them when “legal barriers” got in his way, a friend recalled.

Everson stored his valued collection in the bathtub and closets of his Westside apartment.

“His apartment had wall-to-wall films,” Maltin recalled. “There were some theater seats in the living room and the ever-present projector.”

Day or night, he was known to screen the films for guests in his living room, which became known as a “cinema salon.”

Among others who attended his screenings were Sondheim, Walter Kerr, Diane Keaton and Peter Bogdanovich. But the well-heeled were not the only to benefit from his generosity.

There were stories of people showing up at all hours with special requests, such as the student who needed to see “Lost Horizon” for a project, Maltin said. “Instead of shooing them away, he would say something like, ‘Sure, perhaps you can wait 15 or 20 minutes.’ ”

Before Everson came along, studios considered many old films worthless junk, said Bruce Goldstein, who runs a revival theater in New York City, and called Everson “a resource for everyone involved in the exhibition of classic movies.”

The Museum of Modern Art published a book describing 20 films that were lost forever, Goldstein recalled, and “Everson had five of them.”

Everson is survived by his wife, Karen Latham Everson, and two children from a previous marriage. Mrs. Everson will continue the collection, Goldstein said.