Michael Apted Biography (2)

Michael Apted was born in England and studied law and history at Cambridge University. He began his career as a researcher at Granada Television, eventually becoming a TV director and guiding episodes of the popular series Coronation Street. Several of his television series won British Academy awards with Apted himself named Best Dramatic Director. It was also in England that Apted began a series of documentaries beginning with, 7 Up, 21 Up, 28 Up, 35 Up and 42 Up - that follows the changing lives of a diverse group of men and women every 7 years. Roger Ebert has called it "the most engrossing long-distance documentary project in the history of film." He has continued making documentaries, most recently with Me and Isaac Newton and his current project Married in America for A&E and New Line Television. For this work and others, Apted has been honored with the I.D.A. Career Achievement Award.

Apted came to America in 1980 and his first Hollywood movie, Coal Miner's Daughter, garnered seven Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and an Oscar for Sissy Spacek. He went on to direct Continental Divide, Gorky Park, Kipperbang (giving him another British Academy nomination), First Born, Bring on the Night (which won him a Grammy Award) and Critical Condition. Apted then traveled to Rwanda and Kenya to film Sigourney Weaver in Gorillas in the Mist, earning the actress an Oscar nomination along with four other nominations for the film.

His other films include the acclaimed documentary Incident at Oglala, Thunderheart with Val Kilmer, the thriller Blink starring Madeline Stowe and Nell, which won Jody Foster an Academy Award nomination.

Apted recently directed the medical ethics thriller Extreme Measures and made his own mark on the action blockbuster genre with The World is Not Enough, the most successful James Bond film to date and the code-breaker drama Enigma, produced by Mick Jagger and Lorne Michaels.

Apted has twice been nominated for the Director's Guild of America Award: for Coal Miner's Daughter and for the PBS Production of Harold Pinter's The Collection starring Sir Laurence Olivier.

Behind the camera, Apted executive produced HBO's Criminal Justice, Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracaula, and Strapped. He also executive produced the documentaries 14 Up in America and Age 14 In Russia which premiered on England's BBC in l998.

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