Noted Canadian film director Paul Almond, 83
Canadian filmmaker Paul Almond was working in London in the early 1960s when he and producer Tim Hewitt came up with an idea for a documentary that would examine class and society through the eyes of children.
“Over a couple of pints in a pub,” Almond told the Globe and Mail in Toronto in 2004, “we decided to choose a group of 7-year-olds from both sides of the class divide and explore what their attitudes were.”
The resulting film was “Seven Up!” the first in a heralded series of what came to be known as the “Up” documentaries tracing the lives of the same children as they grew older.
Almond, 83, who directed only the initial film and felt his role in sparking the popular series was unjustly forgotten, died April 9 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
He had a history of coronary problems and suffered his most recent heart attack in early March, said his stepdaughter, Tracy Stoker.
Almond was a prolific television director whose work in the 1950s and early 1960s consisted mostly of dramas, several of which featured appearances by actors who went on to be world famous. Sean Connery, preJames Bond, and Zoe Caldwell started in Almond’s Canadian Broadcast Corp. production of “Macbeth” in1961.
But Almond’s best known project is “Seven Up!,” which debuted on U.K. television in 1964.
“There was a lot of talk of taxing the rich and leveling the playing field,” Almond said in the Globe and Mail interview. “But I was Canadian and Hewitt was Australian, and as outsiders we could see the class system still had an extremely strong hold on British culture and society.”
He began his television career in 1954, directing mostly for anthology shows in Canada. He also occasionally directed for American series, including episodes of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”
Beginning in 1968, he directed three feature films starring Genevieve Bujold, whom Almond married in 1967: “Isabel” (1968), “Act of the Heart,” also starring Donald Sutherland (1970) and “Journey” (1976).