Michael Apted, Director of ‘Up’ Series of Documentaries, Dies at 79
” series of documentaries, as well as “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “Gorillas in the Mist” , “Nell” , James Bond film “The World Is Not Enough” and “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” , has died, his agency Gersh confirmed. He was 79.
From the International Documentary Association he won a 1985 IDA Award for “28 Up.” “56 Up,” produced in 2012, won a Peabody Award “for its creator’s patience and its subjects’ humanity.” The latest installment, “63 Up,” was broadcast on British television in June 2019. His next film, the opposites-attract romantic comedy “Continental Divide,” was not an enormous popular success but has its fans among critics and ordinary moviegoers alike. Apted coaxed a gentle, vulnerable side out of John Belushi, who plays a hard-headed Chicago journalist who rustles the feathers of some bad men in town and takes his editor’s advice to skedaddle for a while; in the Rockies he encounters an eccentric eagle expert played by Blair Brown.
In 1990’s “Class Action,” Apted spurred Gene Hackman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio to better-than-expected performances as father and daughter on opposite sides of a class action suit filed against an auto company by the maimed survivors of crashes in which the cars exploded on impact. In 1994 Apted made the thriller “Blink,” centering on a beautiful violinist who’s recently received corneal transplants enabling her to see, but her vision is not quite to be trusted yet, so she may have witnessed a serial killer and is thus endangered; a policeman seeks to protect her and find the culprit and inevitably falls in love with her.
In 2005 Apted directed three episodes of HBO series “Rome,” winning a DGA Award for outstanding directorial achievement in dramatic series — night in 2006. He began his career in television as a researcher-trainee at Granada Television in Manchester. One of his first projects at Granada led to what would become the “Up” series, which began in 1964 as a profile of 14 7-year-old children for the network’s current affairs series “World in Action.” As a researcher and assistant to Canadian director Paul Almond, Apted participated in the selection of the children.
Apted made his feature directorial debut with 1972’s “The Triple Echo,” starring Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed, an intriguing but tonally uneven story of love and gender-bending in rural England during World War II. The director drew fine performances from Jackson and Reed but couldn’t decide whether he was making a sensitive tragedy or ribald tale.
The next year, the success of “Coal Miner’s Daughter” firmly elevated Apted to the pantheon of A-list directors in Hollywood.“Bring on the Night” documents Stings first solo concert, and for it Apted and Sting shared a 1987 Grammy for best music video, long form.