“The biggest social revolution of my life, growing up in England, was the change in the role of women in society,” he said. “We didn’t have civil rights and Vietnam in England, but I think that particular social revolution is the most important, and I lost it because I didn’t have enough women. And because I didn’t have enough women, I didn’t have enough choice of what options were facing women who were building careers and having families and all that sort of thing. “
He continued: “Looking at everything from ‘Agatha’ to ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’, ‘Nell’ and ‘Continental Divide’, they have everything to do with the role of women in society and what women should do to have a society role, or the choices that women have to make to remain in society or to have a voice in society, in direct and eccentric ways. This has always interested me. And that, I think, stems from the feeling that I lost a little. “
Michael David Apted was born on February 10, 1941, in Aylesbury, in central England, and grew up near London. His father, Ronald, worked for an insurance company, and his mother, Frances, was “a kind of obstinate socialist” who instilled in him a liberal view, as he told The Progressive in 2013.
He attended the prestigious City of London School since he was 10, going to the city on the subway, and then studied history and law at Cambridge University. There, his friends included his fellow student John Cleese, later from the Monty Python troupe. He joined a trainee program in Granada and soon found himself working on “Seven Up!”
When the film aired in May 1964, the response surprised him.
“That first one,” he told The Times in 2019, “was extremely successful. It was the truth of the class system out of the mouth of babies, and the whole country was shocked – people were amazed at the cracks in English celluloid society. “