Michael Apted, director of the acclaimed Up television series – obituary

Michael Apted, who has died aged 79, was a prolific film and television director with Hollywood credits including a James Bond film, but his masterwork was the series of Up documentaries for Granada Television, a unique study of class and social mobility spanning almost 60 years which ranked him among the outstanding auteurs of British TV.

Beginning in 1964 with Seven Up, the series tracked a group of 14 seven-year-olds from different backgrounds as they progressed through life, returning every seven years to update their stories. It was Apted’s idea, but on Seven Up he was only the researcher (“I just found the kids”). From 14 Up (1971) he directed every episode.

Believing that the British class system remained largely undisturbed by two world wars, Apted predicated his films on the Jesuit epigram “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.”

With only three weeks to find the participants before filming started, Apted admitted the boys and girls he picked were “pretty arbitrary”. Nevertheless, reaction to Seven Up was such that Granada commissioned regular follow-ups that continue to this day.

Over the ensuing 56 years, Apted found the incremental nature of the project emotionally draining. He likened it to being head of an extended family, some of whom liked him more than others, some of whom he engaged with more. “As they get older, I am older,” he explained. “I have lived through what they’re living through. It’s more vivid but it’s also much more stressful to do.” When he finished shooting 49 Up, he thought he could not go on, but he did.

Apted had read History and Law at Cambridge, but had no training as a sociologist, “just a kind of nosy interest in the human condition”. For him the series was a political one, although as each seven-year milestone passed, it became more of a human drama. When the critic AA Gill watched 42 Up in 2005, he found the juxtaposition of lives half-run with the black-and-white enthusiasm of seven-year-olds “poignant to the point of tears”.

But Apted’s technical virtuosity was also in play as the cast of characters came increasingly to trust him; as Gill recalled, “his camera in turn treats them with a respect and humility that’s virtually extinct on television.”

In 1999 Apted directed the 21st Bond film, The World Is Not Enough, starring Pierce Brosnan as 007, partly shot on location in Azerbaijan and generally judged to be among the better examples of the genre.

Michael David Apted was born on February 10 1941 in Aylesbury. His father worked in insurance. Having won a scholarship to City of London School, he went on to study Law and History at Downing College, Cambridge, joining Granada Television in Manchester as a trainee in 1963.

After working on Seven Up, shot by the Canadian director Paul Almond, Apted directed several episodes of Coronation Street written by Jack Rosenthal, with whom he later collaborated on pilot episodes of the comedies The Dustbinmen (1969) and The Lovers (1970). They would work together again in 1982 on P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang, the first film commissioned by Channel 4.

He continued to direct dramas for Granada throughout the 1970s, notably Harold Pinter’s play The Collection starring Laurence Olivier, Malcolm MacDowell, Alan Bates and Helen Mirren, which won an Emmy award in 1976, and the following year Stephen Poliakoff’s first television play Stronger Than The Sun (1977), a psychological thriller about nuclear power starring Francesca Annis and Tom Bell which Apted shot entirely on film.

Meanwhile Apted had made his first feature film, The Triple Echo (1972), starring Oliver Reed and Glenda Jackson, followed by Stardust (1974), a follow-up to That’ll Be The Day and again starring David Essex.

Moving to America in 1980 he directed Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), the story of the country singer Loretta Lynn. It received seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, with Sissy Spacek winning Best Actress. Another of his American films, Nell (1994), received three Golden Globe and one Oscar nomination.

In all he directed nearly 30 films for the big screen. Several carried a strong social message or dealt with an ethical dilemma, notably Gorky Park, a political thriller he directed in 1983 about police corruption in the former Soviet Union. His Class Action (1991) dealt with a corporate whistleblower, while Extreme Measures (1996) concerned medical ethics.

In a departure from his documentary earlier work, from 1992 to 1994, Apted ventured into China’s rapidly changing popular culture. In a project backed by Trudie Styler, he directed Moving the Mountain, a feature documentary examining the origins of the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square and the consequences for the movement’s student leaders.

Apted started on an American version of Seven Up but some of the participants dropped out and it was passed from one network to another. On the other hand, Granada’s commitment to broadcast his series on network television every seven years proved critical. The latest instalment of his television epic, 63 Up, was screened in 2019. In 2012 the series won a Peabody Award “for its creator’s patience and its subjects’ humanity”.

For his work in television, Apted won several Bafta awards, including one for Best Dramatic Director. In 2003 he was elected president of the Directors’ Guild of America, and in 2008 was appointed a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG).

Michael Apted was thrice married, first, in 1966, to Joan Proctor, with whom he had two sons, one of whom predeceased him in 2014. With his second wife, the screenwriter Dana Stevens, he had another son. Both marriages were dissolved and in 2014 he married Paige Simpson. One son of his first marriage survives him, with a daughter he fathered with Tania Mellis in 2007.

Michael Apted, born February 10 1941, died January 7 2021