MICHAEL APTED

From 2013: Recording life, seven years at a time British filmmaker Michael Apted, who died on January 7, 2021 at age 79, was best known for his groundbreaking "7 Up" series of documentaries featuring a cohort of London schoolchildren, interviewing them at seven-year intervals throughout the course of their lives. In this January 6, 2013 story, "Sunday Morning" correspondent Lee Cowan talked with Apted (and some of his subjects) about what became his life's work – a living document of humanity probing the joys and sadness of growing up.

Passage: In memoriam "Sunday Morning" remembers some of the notable figures who left us this week, including longtime Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, and documentary filmmaker Michael Apted (the "Up" series).

A representative for the Directors Guild of America said his family informed the organization that he passed Thursday, Jan. 7, 2021. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)Michael Apted, the acclaimed British director of the “Up” documentary series and films as diverse as the Loretta Lynn biopic “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and the James Bond film “The World Is Not Enough,” has died. A representative for the Directors Guild of America said his family informed the organization that he passed Thursday night. Apted served as a researcher on the first film and took over as director seven years later, continuing to check in with the subjects every seven years. “The series was an attempt to do a long view of English society,” Apted told Slant Magazine in 2019.

(CBS News) Imagine your real life experiences from the age of seven made into a series of documentaries. The idea was to gather 7-year-olds from widely different backgrounds, and look at Britain's class system through their eyes. At one end of the extreme: Upper-class seven-year-olds, like the trio of John, Andrew and Charles attending a boarding school. "You see 13, 14 stories up there, and there's elements in some of them that hit home on every life. Now at 56, Suzy is still married to Rupert, with two grown sons and a daughter.

(CBS News) Imagine what it would be like to have your whole life from age seven onwards be part a long running series of documentaries. At one end of the extreme: Upper-class seven-year-olds, like the trio of John, Andrew and Charles attending a boarding school. Andrew: "I've got one, but I don't think much of her!" "You see 13, 14 stories up there, and there's elements in some of them that hit home on every life. Now at 56, Suzy is still married to Rupert, with two grown sons and a daughter.