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Alastair Fothergill

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Alastair Fothergill
Born
Alastair David William Fothergill

(1960-04-10) 10 April 1960 (age 64)
EducationOrley Farm School
Harrow School
Alma materDurham University
Children2

Alastair David William Fothergill OBE (born 10 April 1960) is a British producer of nature documentaries for television and cinema. He is the series producer of the series The Blue Planet (2001), Planet Earth (2006) and the co-director of the associated feature films Deep Blue and Earth.

Early life and education

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Born in London, Fothergill attended Orley Farm School and Harrow School. He studied zoology at St Cuthbert's Society, Durham at Durham University and made his first film, On the Okavango, while still a student.

Career

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Fothergill joined the BBC Natural History Unit in 1983, working on The Really Wild Show, Wildlife on One and David Attenborough's The Trials of Life. He was appointed head of the Unit in 1992, and during his tenure he produced Attenborough's award-winning series Life in the Freezer.

He was awarded the Royal Geographical Society's Cherry Kearton Medal and Award in 1996.[1]

In June 1998, he stood down as head of the Natural History Unit to concentrate on his work as series producer on the multi-award-winning The Blue Planet. In 2006 he completed his next major series Planet Earth, which won the Cinema for Peace Clean Energy Award at the Cinema for Peace Gala Berlin in 2008.[2]

More recently he was executive producer of Frozen Planet (2011) and The Hunt (2015).

He has also presented several television programmes, including The Abyss and is the author of five books.

In 2008, he signed a multi-picture deal with newly formed Disneynature. The first few titles under the Disneynature deal had been, for now, African Cats (2011), Chimpanzee (2012), Bears (2014), Penguins (2019), Dolphin Reef (2020), and Polar Bear (2022) co-directed with Keith Scholey, Mark Linfield, and Jeff Wilson.

In 2012 he left the BBC to co-found Silverback Films with Keith Scholey. Silverback Films makes landmark natural history series for a variety of clients including Netflix ( Our Planet, Our Planet 2 and Life On Our Planet) and the BBC ( The Mating Game and Wild Isles).

In 2016, Fothergill was made a Fellow of the Royal Television Society for his work in natural history programming.[3] He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2019 Birthday Honours for services to film.[4]

Personal life

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Fothergill lives in Bristol with his wife Melinda (née Barker) and two sons, Hamish and William.[5]

Film and television credits

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References

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  1. ^ "Medals and Awards" (PDF). Royal Geographical Society. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2 October 2013. Retrieved 28 September 2013.
  2. ^ ""Grüner Oscar" für "Unsere Erde"". Greenlight Media (in German). 12 February 2008. Retrieved 24 July 2020.
  3. ^ "RTS awards new fellowships | Royal Television Society". rts.org.uk. Retrieved 6 April 2017.
  4. ^ "No. 62666". The London Gazette (Supplement). 8 June 2019. p. B11.
  5. ^ Blundell, Nigel (14 August 2001). "Deep space". ISSN 0307-1235. Retrieved 12 April 2020.
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