Michael apted

Born in Buckinghamshire, England, on February 10, 1941, Michael David Apted was awarded a scholarship to attend the prestigious London School on the banks of the Thames. He then studied law and history at Downing College, Cambridge University.

He began his television career as a six-month fellow, as a researcher, at Granada Television in Manchester. There he started -first as an assistant to Canadian director Paul Almond- an original project, Up , a documentary series started in 1964, which follows the journey of fourteen children from different social classes, who were then seven years old. It was so well received that Michael Apted followed his protagonists until 2019, when they were already in their fifties. While at this company, he also directed several episodes of Coronation Street , and the episode “The Collection of Harold Pinter” from the series Laurence Olivier Presents .

Apted made his feature film debut in 1972, with the war film The Mask and the Skin , where Oliver Reed played a soldier who disguised himself as a woman to flee from the enemy. The prestigious producer David Puttnam recruited him to lead The Idol , about a rock star, and Shy Alan , about a cricket fan. After moving to the United States, he directed the successful thriller about police corruption in the former Soviet Union , Gorky Park , with William Hurt as a Moscow policeman investigating a triple murder, although the director specializes in films led by women, with titles like Agatha  -about the writerAgatha Christie -, I want to be free  -biopic of the country singer Loretta Lynn, with which Sissy Spacek won a well-deserved Oscar-, Nell , with  Jodie Foster  as a young woman who has always lived on the mountain away from everyone, and especially all  Gorillas in the Fog , his best-remembered film, with Sigourney Weaver  as anthropologist Dian Fossey. “Female leads bring more dramatic richness to the stories,” she stated in an interview.

In 1966, Michael Apted married actress Jo Apted, with whom he had two children before divorcing. He later had another offspring with screenwriter-actress Dana Stevens , and remained attached to producer Paige Simpson until his death. The filmmaker is also behind Crossing the Line , on medical ethics, Thunderheart , a thriller that explores the living conditions of Native Americans on reservations, and Legal Action , which denounces the intricacies that large corporations can carry out. He even allowed himself some foray into light comedy, with Critical State and My Nest or Yours , adapted by CS Lewis, with The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader , signed up for the golden age of series with three chapters of Rome , and is even behind a James Bond film, The World Is Never Enough , which begins with a sequence in which the character, played by Pierce Brosnan , visits the Guggenheim in Bilbao. The entertaining thriller about a CIA agent  Open Source , from 2017, was his last work for the big screen.

Michael Apted served as president of the Directors Guild of America from 2003 to 2009. He served as the institution’s treasurer from 2011 until his death.