35 Up · The Up Series
1991-05-22 · Michael Apted · 116 min
Tony Walker
The happy family portrait of 28 had darkened: a lost baby, two dead parents and a marriage under strain. Tony was candid about his wandering eye, and the ponies were the one continuous thread back to the seven-year-old.
Neil Hughes
Shetland gave Neil a roof and a small stage. He was not well, but writing pantomimes for islanders was the first outward-facing thing he had done since childhood.
Bruce Balden
Bangladesh was the missionary dream made real in secular form. Bruce at 35 was doing exactly what the seven-year-old had said he would, and still had no one to come home to.
Suzy Lusk (Suzanne Dewey)
Loss entered Suzy's life in her thirties — a father dead, a mother ill — and she turned it into work, counselling the bereaved. The privileged girl had found something useful to do with grief.
Nick Hitchon
Settled in the American Midwest as a father and scientist, still chasing fusion. His wife's absence from the film left the marriage a visible blank.
Andrew Brackfield
Father of two boys and a rising lawyer. His decision against boarding school was the first visible departure from the path he had been raised on.
John Brisby
Back on his own terms: a successful barrister using the series as a platform for post-communist Bulgaria, the country of his mother's family. The interviewer was now producer Claire Lewis, a fact kept private until 70 Up.
Jackie Bassett
The settled life of 28 has gone: Jackie is a divorced single mother of a toddler, bartending for low wages and leaning on her family. She is candid that class narrowed her options more than she once admitted.
Lynn Johnson
35 Up introduces the illness that shadows the rest of Lynn's life, alongside grief for her mother. Yet against a film full of divorces she is the one whose marriage holds.
Sue Davis (later Sue Sullivan; Sue Fitzgerald from 2020)
The marriage is over and Sue is raising two children alone and working again. It is the film in which she first talks about class honestly — her optimism about choice at 21 gives way to clear-eyed realism.
Paul Kligerman
At 35 Paul was running his own bricklaying business in Melbourne and raising two children with Susan. Granada paid to fly him back to England for filming, one of several trips the series funded that also let him rebuild contact with his estranged mother. He was steady but still doubted himself, and Susan continued to be the more confident half of the couple.