His body of work also included ‘Gorky Park’, ‘Gorillas in the Mist,’ The World Is Not Enough ‘and’ Nell ‘.
Michael Apted, the acclaimed British director behind the decades-old revolutionary series Seven Up documentaries and resources, including Coal Miner’s Daughter, Nell and The world is not enough, died. He was 79 years old.
Roy Ashton of the Gersh Agency confirmed Apted’s death in The Hollywood Reporter. No details of his death were immediately available.
Apted made his directorial debut with the war saga The Triple Eco (1972), starring Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed, and his resume also included Continental currency (1981), presenting John Belushi as a romantic actor; the crime drama Collective action (1991), starring Gene Hackman; and the thrillers Gorky Park (1983), with William Hurt; Thunderheart (1992), with Val Kilmer; Blink (1993), starring Madeleine Stowe; Extreme measures (1996), with Hugh Grant; Puzzle (2001), with Kate Winslet; and Enough (2002), starring Jennifer Lopez.
Apted served three terms as president of the 2003-09 DGA – the longest consecutive presidential service since George Sidney in the 1960s – and received the Robert B. Aldrich award from the guild in 2013 and his honorary honorary membership five years later.
“Your legacy will forever be woven into the fabric of the cinema and our guild,” said DGA President Thomas Schlamme in a statement. “A fearless visionary as an incomparable director and guild leader, Michael saw the trajectory of things when others did not, and we were all the beneficiaries of his wisdom and lifelong dedication.”
Former DGA President Taylor Hackford added: “Michael Apted was the definition of ‘mensch’ – as the wonderful director he was, you could always count on him to provide a clear and well thought out point of view, usually fermented with a lot of wit. “
He was also a member of the board of directors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Longtime rock ‘n’ roll fan, directed by Apted Star dust (1974), who starred in the real-life rocker, British singer-songwriter David Essex, and plunged into the bowels of the music world.
His musical documentaries included Bring at night (1985), who narrated the creation of Sting’s O Blue turtles dream album and subsequent tour (Apted won a Grammy for a video of that one), and The Long Way Home (1989), about Boris Grebenshchikov, a Soviet version of Bruce Springsteen.
He made a film about the Rolling Stones’ Forty Licks tour in 2002 that, after a disagreement with Mick Jagger, was never released, and his 1997 document Inspirations he focused on David Bowie and six other artists: the painter Roy Lichtenstein, the sculptor Nora Naranjo Morse, the architect Tadao Ando, the glass blower Dale Chihuly, the choreographer Édouard Lock and the dancer Louise LeCavalier.
In his first job after graduating from Cambridge University, his class-conscious Apted worked as a trainee at Granada Television in 1964, when he was tasked with finding some of the 14 children who would be interviewed for a 40-minute ITV documentary called Seven Up!
Paul Almond, the project director, “was more interested in making a beautiful film about the seven years, while I wanted to do a nasty job about these kids who have everything and these other kids who have nothing,” Apted said in an interview 2012 to RadioTimes.
Seven Up! was designed to be a “one,” he noted, but Granada decided to check on children in 1970 with 7 plus seven, putting Apted in charge as its producer and director.
He then directed all subsequent editions: 21 Up (1977), 28 Up (1984) – when participants started to get paid for their time – 35 Up (1991), 42 Up (1998), 49 Up (2005), 56 Up (2012) and 63 Up (2019).
Not all of the original children have appeared in all films and one, Charles Furneaux, has not returned since 21 Up. “He is now a documentary filmmaker [he executive produced 2003’s Touching the Void], which I find particularly difficult to swallow, “said Apted.
Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), starring Sissy Spacek in an Oscar winner like Loretta Lynn, marked her first directing project in the United States. He said that although he had never heard of the country singer, he got the job because Joseph Sargent, Universal’s first choice, didn’t think Spacey looked enough like Lynn to justify her getting the part.
Apted also guided Jodie Foster and Sigourney Weaver to the Oscar nominations for best actress in Gorillas in the mist (1988) and Nell (1994), respectively, before addressing the work of James Bond The world is not enough (1999), starring Pierce Brosnan.
The 007 film “really was kind of a number,” he said in a 2013 interview for the DGA website, “and I think it’s not an unusual experience in these big visual effects films, when other things are more important than dialogue and history sometimes, at your own risk. “
Things didn’t go well for him either. Critical condition (1987), with Paramount losing faith in Richard Pryor’s ability to star in a drama and insisting in the middle of production for the film to become a comedy, and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010), with producers reducing their budget after the second film in the series sank.
Michael David Apted was born on February 10, 1941, in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, England. Her father, Ronald, worked for an insurance company, and her mother, Frances, was a housewife.
Raised in a working-class neighborhood in East London, Apted visited the Ingmar Bergman restaurant Wild Strawberries as a teenager and called the experience “a total epiphany”.
“I was a great reader, read a ton of things and was interested in literature and poetry and all that sort of thing,” he said. “Here was something, a movie, that I thought was the seriousness and seriousness of a book … and from then on I knew what I wanted to do.”
Apted acted in plays at the City of London School, studied law and history at Cambridge Downing College and started his career in show business in Granada.
For children to be drawn in Seven Up!, commissioned for the news series World in action, Apted said, “I wasn’t looking for specific personalities, I was looking for a representation of different class backgrounds.”
In 1966, he began directing episodes of the soap opera Granada-ITV Coronation Street, volunteering for that show when he heard that Mike Newell had gone on vacation. He said his soap opera experience was the reason he was hired to The Triple Eco.
“Glenda was at the height of her power; she had just won an Oscar [for Women in Love] and was going to win a second [for A Touch of Class], but it was only available for six weeks, “he said.” And then the people who were editing the film thought, ‘Well, we don’t want to [John] Schlesinger or Karel Reisz or Lindsay Anderson. They will be there for years doing this. We’d better get someone on television who can do this quickly. “
Apted’s next two resources were police drama The Squeeze (1977), with Stacy Keach, and Agatha(1979), starring Dustin Hoffman and, like Agatha Christie, Vanessa Redgrave.
After Coal Miner’s Daughter – who lost to Common people in the race for best film – Apted left England to live in the USA
His other documentaries included Incident in Oglala (1992), on the arrest of Leonard Peltier for the 1975 murder of two FBI agents on a Sioux reservation in South Dakota (served as the basis for Thunderheart): Moving the mountain (1994), about the protests in Tiananmen Square; Isaac Newton and I (1999), a science project along the lines of Inspirations; and A & E’s Married in america, a type of 7 Up with couples.
More recently, Apted directed Wonderful grace (2006), Chasing Mavericks (2012) – assuming afterwards that Curtis Hanson left for health reasons – and Unlocked (2017) and commanded the episodes of Ray Donovan, Masters of sex and Lineage.
Survivors include his third wife, Paige, whom he married in January 2014, and sons James, John and Lily. Another son, sound editor Paul Apted, died in 2014 at the age of 47 from colon cancer.
I came back to Seven Up every seven years makes you reflect on your own life? “Not as much as it should,” he said in his interview with RadioTimes.
“Sometimes, I reflect on where I was at 28 or 35 or whatever. But more often, I reflect on how it influenced my entire career. I never get tired of talking about it and I relate to people for it. “