Norma Percy (born c. 1942 [1] ) is an American-born, documentary film maker and producer. The documentaries she has produced in collaboration with Brian Lapping have covered many of the crises of the 20th Century. [2] In 2010, she was awarded the Orwell Prize Special Prize for Lifetime Achievement. [3]
Percy was born and raised in New York City. She studied politics at Oberlin College in Ohio, later studying for a master's degree at the London School of Economics. [4] [5] She then became a researcher at the House of Commons where she spent six years; in her time there, she worked as a researcher for the MP John Mackintosh, who recommended her to the Granada Television producer Brian Lapping when he was looking for a researcher for a documentary on the workings of Parliament called The State of the Nation. [4]
 | This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (May 2011) |
Percy produced the Granada series End of Empire (1985), which explored the effects of the end of the British Empire in various former colonies, and worked with Lapping on the 1987 drama-documentary Breakthrough at Reykjavik, a reconstruction of the Reykjavík Summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986. [6]
After fifteen years at Granada, Percy joined the newly formed production company Brian Lapping Associates in 1988. (When that company later merged with Brook Associates in 1997, she was a founding director of the new company Brook Lapping.) [5]
The Percy-produced documentary series Watergate aired on the BBC and the Discovery Channel in 1994. Narrated by Daniel Schorr and directed by Mick Gold, this five-part series chronicled the Watergate scandal and featured exclusive interviews with many of the key participants in the events, including H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Dean and G. Gordon Liddy as well as former President Gerald Ford. [7] [8] [9] The series won an Emmy Award. [5]
The Death of Yugoslavia (1995), with Lapping as co-producer, covered the events that led to the collapse of the former Yugoslavia and the aftermath. The series again contained interviews with many of the major participants, including Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić. The series won a BAFTA Award as Best Factual Series for 1995. [10] The Balkans were revisited in the 2001 series The Fall of Milošević which dealt with the fall from power of the Serbian leader. [11]
Percy, along with Brian Lapping, was awarded the Alan Clarke Award (for outstanding contribution to Television) at the 2002 BAFTA awards. [12] [13]
Percy was made a Fellow of the Royal Television Society in 1999 [14] and was awarded the Judges Prize by that society at the 2010 RTS Awards. [15] In 2009, at the Grierson Awards, she, along with colleagues from the Brook Lapping production company, won the Best Documentary Series award for Iran and the West; [16] Percy also given the Trustee's Prize by the Grierson Trust for her contributions to documentary film over the previous 30 years. [17] [18] The Special Prize for Lifetime Achievement was given to her at the Orwell Prize ceremony in 2010. [3]
In 2009, The Guardian wrote of Percy: "Her documentaries stand out for their seriousness, but most of all for the extraordinary range of people who agree to appear on them. These programmes do not depend on one celebrity autobiography, or a handful of journalistic talking heads; they interrogate players from all sides with a respect for complexities that demands concentration." [19]
In 2004, she married the geneticist Steve Jones; the couple had lived together since 1977. [20]
Carnival Film & Television Limited, trading as Carnival Films, is a British production company based in London, UK, founded in 1978. It has produced television series for all the major UK networks including the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Sky, as well as international broadcasters including PBS, A&E, HBO and NBC. Productions include single dramas, long-running television dramas, feature films, and stage productions.
James Leslie John Woodhead, OBE is a British documentary filmmaker.
Anne Wood, CBE is an English children's television producer, responsible for creating shows such as Teletubbies with Andrew Davenport. She is also the creator of Tots TV and Rosie and Jim. She was a recipient of the Eleanor Farjeon Award.
Daran Little is a BAFTA-winning and Emmy Award-nominated British television writer. He is the only writer to pen more than 100 episodes of both Coronation Street and EastEnders.
Roger Arthur Graef OBE was an American-born British documentary filmmaker and theatre director. Born in New York City, he moved to Britain in 1962, where he began a career producing documentary films investigating previously closed institutions, including Government ministries and court buildings.
Peter Taylor, is a British journalist and documentary-maker. He is best known for his coverage of the political and armed conflict in Northern Ireland, widely known as the Troubles, and for his investigation of Al Qaeda and Islamist extremism in the wake of 9/11. He also covers the issue of smoking and health and the politics of tobacco for which he was awarded the WHO Gold Medal for Services to Public Health. He has written books and researched, written and presented television documentaries over a period of more than forty years. In 2014, Taylor was awarded both a Royal Television Society lifetime achievement award and a BAFTA special award.
Jonathan Whitehead was an English musician and composer, born in Denton, Lancashire. He wrote music for television comedies such as The Day Today, Brass Eye, Black Books, Green Wing, Campus and Nathan Barley. He studied music at the University of Bristol and later lived in London. He sometimes wrote under the name "Trellis".
Peter Kosminsky is a British writer, director and producer. He has directed Hollywood movies such as White Oleander and television films like Warriors, The Government Inspector, The Promise, Wolf Hall and The State.
Goran Marković is a Serbian film and theatre director, screenwriter, writer, and playwright. He has directed approximately 50 documentaries, 13 feature films, and 3 theatre plays. He has also written five books.
Molly Dineen is a television documentary director, cinematographer and producer. One of Britain's most acclaimed documentary filmmakers, Dineen is known for her intimate and probing portraits of British individuals and institutions. Her work includes The Lie of the Land (2007), examining the decline of the countryside and British farming, The Ark (1993) about London Zoo during Thatcherism, and the Lords' Tale (2002), which examined the removal of hereditary peers.
James Allan Stuart Little is a Special Correspondent for BBC News, based at New Broadcasting House, London.
Andrew Harries is chief executive and co-founder of Left Bank Pictures, a UK based production company formed in 2007. In a career spanning four decades he has produced television dramas including The Royle Family,Cold Feet, the revivals of Prime Suspect and Cracker, as well as the BAFTA-winning television play The Deal.
James Honeyborne is the creative director of Freeborne Media, he previously worked as an executive producer at the BBC Natural History Unit where he oversaw some 35 films, working with multiple co-producers around the world. His projects include the Emmy Award and BAFTA-winning series Blue Planet II, the Emmy Award-nominated series Wild New Zealand with National Geographic, and the BAFTA-winning BBC1 series Big Blue Live with PBS.
John Smithson is a British film and television producer.
Cat Lewis is a British TV executive producer and the founder and CEO of Nine Lives Media.
Anthony Wonke is a film director. He is an Emmy and triple BAFTA winning director and an Oscar nominated and Emmy winning executive producer. He has also won, amongst other awards, the Prix Italia, Peabody, Grierson and RTS for his films. Wonke is known for his original feature documentaries Ronaldo, Being AP, Fire in the Night and The Battle for Marjah as well as his documentary series The Tower: A Tale of Two Cities. Wonke's work ranges across a variety of genres always highlighted by intelligence, visual flair and emotional insight. His work has been shown at film festivals in the US, Canada, the Far East and the UK, as well as being televised on BBC 1, BBC 2, Channel 4 and HBO.
Brian Michael Lapping CBE is an English journalist, television producer and historian. Lapping is also the chairman and founding member of Brook Lapping, a television and radio production company focused on the production of historical documentaries.
Philippa Lowthorpe is an English film and television director. She was awarded the Deluxe Director Award at the WFTV Film and Television Awards for the miniseries Three Girls. She recently directed episodes of the second season of The Crown and the 2020 film Misbehaviour.
Watergate is a documentary series co-produced by the BBC and Discovery, broadcast in 1994. It was based on the book Watergate: The Corruption and Fall of Richard Nixon, by Fred Emery. The series was directed by Mick Gold and produced by Paul Mitchell and Norma Percy.
Peter Gwynne Morgan is a Welsh television and film writer/producer. A winner of the 2009 Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming for his work on Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, he is married to American documentary director Marina Zenovich.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
