The man who made James Bond grow up
Filmmaker of innovative Seven Up!
Michael Apted, 79, the innovative filmmaker behind the Up documentary series that chronicled a group of British people for more than 50 years, and also made such varied feature films as Coal Miner’s Daughter and The World Is Not Enough, died Jan. 7 in Los Angeles. Cause was undisclosed. Apted’s training as a documentarian lent a naturalism to an eclectic Hollywood career, and for four decades the English- born Apted helmed 21 feature films — from the Cold War thriller Gorky Park ( 1983), starring William Hurt, to the blockbuster The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010).
Many of his best- known films featured strong female leads, and he directed several actresses to Academy Award recognition. Sissy Spacek won an Oscar as country star Loretta Lynn in the 1980 biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter. Sigourney Weaver was nominated for playing primatologist Dian Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist (1988), and Jodie Foster as a girl growing up in the North Carolina woods in Nell (1994).
Seven Up! examined the different socioeconomic backgrounds and presumed trajectories of 14 boys and girls from London.
The film aired on British television in 1963 and was an unexpected phenomenon, a groundbreaking piece of cinema vérité and social anthropology. Every seven years, from 1963 to 2019, he dropped back in on the kids as they became an upper- class politician, a humble librarian, a science teacher who moved to America, creating an unprecedented diary not just of his subjects’ lives, but of Britain itself, and even the world.
Apted soon followed his boyhood dream to Hollywood. He made period dramas — such as the Agatha Christie mystery Agatha ( 1979), starring Vanessa Redgrave — as well as the romantic comedy Continental Divide ( 1981), starring John Belushi.
Apted was approached to direct a James Bond film in 1999: The World Is Not Enough came out on the heels of Apted’s latest Up chapter, 42 Up, and in a New York Times review, critic Janet Maslin wrote: “Doggone if Apted hasn’t been able to make James Bond grow up a little, too.”