William Cran, an Emmy-winning master of the television documentary whose expansive body of work, primarily for the BBC and the PBS program “Frontline,” delved into complex subjects like the history of the English language and the private life of the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover, died on June 4 in London. He was 79.
His wife, Vicki Baker-Cran, said cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease. He died in a hospital.
Mr. Cran produced more than 50 documentaries over 50 years and directed many of them.
He began his career with the BBC, but he mostly worked as an independent producer, toggling between jobs on both sides of the Atlantic.
He was most closely associated with “Frontline,” for which he produced 20 documentaries on a wide range of subjects — some historical, like the four-part series “From Jesus to Christ” (1998) and “The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover” (1993), and some focused on current events, like “Who’s Afraid of Rupert Murdoch” (1995).
He won a slew of honors, including four Emmys, four duPont-Columbia University awards, two Peabodys and an Overseas Press Club Award.
In 1986, Mr. Carr produced “The Story of English,” an Emmy-winning nine-episode series for the BBC and PBS about how English became the world’s dominant language. He, with the journalists Robert MacNeil, the PBS news anchor, fand Robert McCrum, turned it into a book.
Mr. Cran produced two multipart documentaries based on books by the historian Daniel Yergin: “The Prize” (1990), a Pulitzer-winning history of oil, and “The Commanding Heights” (1998, with Joseph Stanislaw), about the history of the modern global economy.
These were complicated stories, but Mr. Cran was able to frame them around characters and narrative threads that kept viewers engaged over several nights.
“I learned from him that less is more, that the script is not a shortened version of the book, but rather captions to go with the picture,” Mr. Yergin wrote in an email. “He always stuck to the facts, but he always wanted dramatic tension.”
Both documentaries were well-received, despite their potentially dry material. “Using every familiar element of the documentarian’s art, producer-director William Cran has created a masterpiece,” The Washington Post wrote of “The Commanding Heights.”
William Cran was born on Dec. 11, 1945, in Hobart, on the island state of Tasmania, Australia. His mother, Jean (Holliday) Cran, was a teacher, and his father, John, was a science lecturer. The family moved to London when William was 6.
He studied classics at Oxford, and though he knew early on that he wanted to make documentaries, he also dabbled in theater — two plays he wrote in college were later performed in London.
After graduating in 1968, he became a trainee at the BBC, where he rose to producer, using then-novel techniques like reconstructed scenes, and pursuing new genres like true crime. One early documentary was “1971 Luton Postmaster Murder,” about two men who were wrongly convicted of killing a British postmaster.
But Mr. Cran grew tired of being what he called a “company man,” and left the BBC after eight years; he even turned down an offer to take a sabbatical if he would stay on.
He moved to Toronto in 1976, becoming a senior producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s investigative news program “The Fifth Estate.”
Two years later, David Fanning, an executive at WGBH, the public television station in Boston, reached out to him about a documentary program he was creating called “World.”
Mr. Cran flew to Boston for a meeting — and got stuck in one of the worst blizzards to hit New England in decades. While holed up at Mr. Fanning’s home, the two cooked up an idea for Mr. Cran’s first documentary for the program, “Chachaji: My Poor Relation,” a story of modern India told through the family of the writer Ved Mehta.
“What was particular about Bill is that each one of his films is different,” Mr. Fanning said in an interview, adding, “He would do these surprising things. He would say: ‘I think I want to build a set. I want to build a bedroom in the studio.’”
Mr. Fanning trusted Mr. Cran so much that in 1983, when “World” was rebranded as “Frontline,” with a tighter focus on current events, he asked Mr. Cran to produce its first two documentaries — one about corruption in the N.F.L., and the other about the murder of five civil rights activists by white supremacists in North Carolina.
Mr. Cran’s first marriage, to Araminta Wordsworth, ended in divorce. His second wife, Stephanie Tepper, who worked with him as a producer on several films, died in 1997. His third wife, Polly Bide, died in 2003. He married Vicki Barker, a CBS journalist, in 2014.
She survives him, as do three daughters from his second marriage, Jessica, Rebecca and Chloe Cran; his sister, Vicki Donovan; and a granddaughter.
Many of Mr. Cran’s films continue to be watched.
“Two months ago,” Mr. Yergin said, “I was walking up Madison Avenue and someone — out of the blue, startled to see me — stopped me to say that watching ‘Commanding Heights’ had changed his life.”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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