56 Up · The Up Series
2012-05-14 · Michael Apted · 144 min
Tony Walker
The recession had scuttled the Spanish venture and the household was crowded again with grown children. Tony was undaunted but the upward curve of 49 had flattened.
Neil Hughes
Neil at 56 was a fixture of Cumbrian local politics and an eccentric by his own description. Steadier than at any earlier point, he remained solitary and openly unresolved about whether his life had amounted to anything.
Bruce Balden
A quiet film for a quiet man: Bruce at 56 was secure in work and family, and unusually honest about his emotional reticence.
Suzy Lusk (Suzanne Dewey)
56 Up caught Suzy still turning up despite herself. Paired with Neil, she was frank about the cost of being recognised and judged by strangers for a life edited into seven-year slices.
Nick Hitchon
A respected teacher who had made peace with fusion's failure to arrive, guarding his parents' privacy while speaking candidly about his own. The most self-aware participant about what the series costs its subjects.
Andrew Brackfield
Comfortable, married for decades, with sons launched and a wife looking for her own next chapter. Critics noted he had hardly rejected the benefits of his birth but wore them lightly.
John Brisby
The film in which he corrected the record: the 'posh boy' had been a scholarship boy from a widowed household. He challenged the series' class thesis head-on while acknowledging a fortunate life.
Jackie Bassett
56 Up finds Jackie grieving and fighting the benefits system at the same time, yet buoyed by her first grandchild and her sons. Her defiance of the "fit to work" ruling became one of the film's most quoted passages about austerity Britain.
Lynn Johnson
Her final film. The job she loved has just been cut from under her, but Lynn measures her life by her marriage, her grandchildren and the school she serves, and declares herself content. A year later she was dead.
Sue Davis (later Sue Sullivan; Sue Fitzgerald from 2020)
Content and busy: a law-school administrator, a 14-year fiancée, a performer in her spare time. Sue is the East End participant whose life most cleanly refutes the film's 1964 predictions.
Paul Kligerman
At 56 Paul and Susan worked side by side at a retirement village, he as the handyman looking after the small units and gardens. He was a grandfather five times over, and his daughter Katy had become the first Kligerman to attend university, the thing he could not even define at seven. He seemed content and, for the first time, not to be fighting his own self-doubt.
Symon Basterfield
At 56 Symon handled freight at Heathrow by day and, with Vienetta, had given a home to some sixty-five foster children. He looked at the education he had not bothered with and at the income it had cost him without bitterness, calling himself a lazy sod rather than a victim. His marriage was happy and he described himself, half amused, as a shy boy who had somehow become a bit of a star.
Peter Davies
Peter walked back into 56 Up with a disarming honesty about why: he wanted publicity for his alt-country band. In the meantime he had remade his life, leaving teaching for law and the civil service, divorcing and marrying Gabrielle, his harmony singer, and raising two children back in Liverpool. The angry young man of 1984 had become a wry, settled 56-year-old, and the audience welcomed him rather than jeering.