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Producer · Actor · Director · Writer

1926-05-08 · Isleworth, Middlesex, England, UK · Male

98 series in the catalog

Sir David Frederick Attenborough ( AT-ən-bər-ə; born 8 May 1926) is an English broadcaster, natural historian, and writer. His presenting career began as host of Zoo Quest in 1954, and has spanned seven decades; it includes the nine documentary series forming The Life Collection, Natural World, Wildlife on One, the Planet Earth franchise, The Blue Planet and Frozen Planet. He is the only person to have won BAFTA Awards in black-and-white, colour, high-definition, 3D and 4K resolution. Over his life, he has collected dozens of honorary degrees and awards, including three Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Narrator and one Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Daytime Personality – Non-Daily.

Attenborough was a senior manager at the BBC, working as controller of BBC Two and director of programming for BBC Television in the 1960s and 1970s. While his earlier work focused primarily on the natural world, his later work has been more vocal in support for environmental causes. He has advocated for restoring planetary biodiversity, limiting population growth, switching to renewable energy, mitigating climate change, reducing meat consumption and setting aside more areas for natural preservation. On his broadcasting and passion for nature, NPR stated that Attenborough "roamed the globe and shared his discoveries and enthusiasms with his patented semi-whisper way of narrating". He is widely considered a national treasure in the UK, though he does not embrace the term.

Early life and family

David Frederick Attenborough was born on 8 May 1926 in Isleworth, Middlesex, and grew up in College House on the campus of University College, Leicester, where his father, Frederick, worked as the principal. He is the middle of three sons; his older brother, Richard, became an actor and director, and his younger brother, John, was an executive at the Italian car manufacturer Alfa Romeo. During the Second World War, through a British volunteer network known as the Refugee Children's Movement, his parents fostered two Jewish refugee girls from Germany.

Attenborough spent his childhood collecting fossils, stones and natural specimens. He received encouragement when a young Jacquetta Hawkes admired his collection. He spent much time in the grounds of the university. Aged around 11, he heard that the zoology department needed a large supply of newts, which he offered through his father to supply for 3d each. The source, which he did not reveal at the time, was a pond adjacent to the department. A year later, his adoptive sister Marianne gave him a piece of amber containing prehistoric creatures; some 60 years later, it would be the focus of "The Amber Time Machine", an episode of his series Natural World.

In 1936, Attenborough and his brother Richard attended a lecture by Grey Owl (Archibald Belaney) at De Montfort Hall in Leicester and were influenced by his advocacy of conservation. According to Richard, David was bowled over by the man's determination to save the beaver, by his profound knowledge of the flora and fauna of the Canadian wilderness and by his warnings of ecological disaster should the delicate balance between them be destroyed. The idea that mankind was endangering nature by recklessly despoiling and plundering its riches was unheard of at the time, but it is one that has remained part of David's own credo to this day. In 1999, Richard directed a biographical film of Belaney entitled Grey Owl.

Attenborough was educated at Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys in Leicester, now known as Wyggeston and Queen Elizabeth I College. In 1944 his father arranged for him to join University College Nottingham's (now the University of Nottingham) Geology Department as a part-time student on a Geology Practical course. He won a scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge, in 1945 to study geology and zoology, was a member of the undergraduate Sedgwick Club and obtained a degree in natural sciences. In 1947, he was called up for national service in the Royal Navy and spent two years stationed in North Wales and the Firth of Forth.

Early years at the BBC

After leaving the navy, Attenborough took a position editing children's science textbooks for a publishing company. He soon became disillusioned with the work and in 1950 applied for a job as a radio talk producer with the BBC. Although he was rejected for this job, his curriculum vitae later attracted the interest of Mary Adams, head of the Talks (factual broadcasting) department of the BBC's fledgling television service. Attenborough, like most Britons at that time, did not own a television and had seen only one programme in his life.

He accepted Adams' offer of a three-month training course. In 1952, he joined the BBC full-time. Initially discouraged from appearing on camera because Adams thought his teeth were too big, he became a producer for the Talks department, which handled all non-fiction broadcasts. His early projects included the quiz show Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? and Song Hunter, a series about folk music presented by Alan Lomax.

Attenborough's association with natural history programmes began when he produced and presented the three-part series Animal Patterns. The studio-bound programme featured animals from London Zoo, with the naturalist Julian Huxley discussing their use of camouflage, aposematism and courtship displays. Through this programme, Attenborough met Jack Lester, the curator of the zoo's reptile house, and they decided to make a series about an animal-collecting expedition. The result was Zoo Quest, first broadcast in 1954, where Attenborough became the presenter at short notice due to Lester being taken ill.

In 1957, the BBC Natural History Unit was formally established in Bristol. Attenborough was asked to join it, but declined, not wishing to move from London where he and his young family were settled. Instead, he formed his own department, the Travel and Exploration Unit, which allowed him to continue to front Zoo Quest as well as produce other documentaries, notably the Travellers' Tales and Adventure series. In the early 1960s Attenborough resigned from the permanent staff of the BBC to study for a postgraduate degree in social anthropology at the London School of Economics, interweaving his study with further filming. However, he accepted an invitation to return to the BBC as controller of BBC Two before he could finish the degree.

BBC administration

Attenborough became Controller of BBC Two in March 1965, succeeding Michael Peacock. He had a clause inserted in his contract that would allow him to continue making programmes on an occasional basis. Later the same year he filmed elephants in Tanzania and in 1969 made a three-part series on the cultural history of the Indonesian island of Bali. For the 1971 film A Blank on the Map, he joined the first Western expedition to a remote highland valley in New Guinea to seek out a lost tribe.

BBC Two was launched in 1964, but had struggled to capture the public's imagination. When Attenborough arrived as controller, he quickly abolished the channel's quirky kangaroo mascot and shook up the schedule. With a mission to make BBC Two's output diverse and different from that offered by other networks, he began to establish a portfolio of programmes that defined the channel's identity for decades to come. Under his tenure, music, the arts, entertainment, archaeology, experimental comedy, travel, drama, sport, business, science and natural history all found a place in the weekly schedules. Often, an eclectic mix was offered within a single evening's viewing. Programmes he commissioned included Man Alive, Call My Bluff, Chronicle, The Old Grey Whistle Test, Monty Python's Flying Circus and The Money Programme. With the advent of colour television, Attenborough brought snooker to the BBC to show the benefits of the format, as the sport uses coloured balls. The show – Pot Black – was later credited with the boom of the sport into the 1980s. In…