He is most noted for his production of the 1958 Rank Organisation / Pinewood Studios film, A Night to Remember, which recreates the story of the sinking of RMS Titanic, based on the book of the same name by Walter Lord.

In 1926, he was posted to the Far East, joining the Auxiliary Punjab Light Horse at Amritsar, who were a handful of volunteer soldiers whose job was to defend the memsahibs and the children in a city that was widely regarded as one of the most seditious in India.

After an informal apprenticeship working with the established film producer Sydney Box, MacQuitty's film contributions to the war effort included Out of Chaos, a portrait of the war artists Henry Moore, Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland, among others, and The Way We Live (1946), which chronicled the rebuilding of the heavily bombed city of Plymouth.

Big feature films then followed, including The Happy Family (1952), Street Corner (1953), The Beachcomber (1954), and Above Us the Waves (1954) which starred John Mills – an account of the disabling of the German Battleship Tirpitz by British Midget submarines.

As a six-year-old, MacQuitty had witnessed the ship being launched from the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast in May 1911,[1] and watched the maiden voyage departure the following year.

He was amused and flattered in 1997 when James Cameron, who had just completed his own epic on Titanic, took the trouble to thank him personally for his vision in creating A Night to Remember and causing a "ripple effect through modern culture" which he said had partly inspired his own film.

Visiting Egypt for the first time, initially to research and make a film about Gordon of Khartoum (though this never appeared), MacQuitty became fascinated by the attempts to save the Great Temple of Abu Simbel from the flooding that would follow the completion of the Aswan High Dam.

Buddha, published in 1969 included a foreword by the Dalai Lama, and in 1971 the Shah of Iran sponsored a large volume to commemorate the 2,500th anniversary of his country.

Throughout his life, MacQuitty was endlessly delighted to learn from the people he met all around the world, particularly the Orient and the Middle East and was enthralled by the exotic contrast with his homeland.