David Attenborough would probably rather the cameras were pointed somewhere else.
As the broadcaster turns 100 on Friday, the BBC is hosting a party for him at the Royal Albert Hall, cinemas are screening his nature films and friends have spent weeks praising his life and work. But Alastair Fothergill, producer of some of Attenborough’s best-known documentaries, said the attention is not something he enjoys.
“He’s always been very clear to all of us that work with him: ‘Remember, the animals are the stars, I’m not,’” Fothergill told The Associated Press. “So, yes, surprisingly for one of the most famous men on the planet, he doesn’t like being famous at all.”
Scientists, politicians and conservationists have marked the week by celebrating the presenter who has brought gorillas, whales and poisonous frogs into living rooms for more than 70 years. Through BBC programs including Life on Earth, The Private Life of Plants and The Blue Planet, Attenborough showed viewers the beauty, ferocity and strangeness of nature in the quiet, musical voice that became his signature.
His programs took audiences to the Himalayas, the Amazon and the forests of Papua New Guinea. They also paired striking images with scientific accuracy, helping explain subjects including evolution, animal behaviour and biodiversity.
As evidence of environmental damage grew, Attenborough also began warning about climate change, ocean plastic and other threats caused by humans. Professor Ben Garrod, an evolutionary biologist at the University of East Anglia who has worked with Attenborough, said that helped people understand “not only how life evolved but, more importantly, why we have to protect it”.
Garrod said Attenborough at first saw himself as a neutral observer, but later felt he had to speak out.
“He is showing you the majesty, the ferocity, the fragility of the natural world. He shouldn’t have ever had to have turned to policymaking and advocacy,” Garrod said. “I think it’s very easy for a lot of people to say, ‘He should have done it sooner. Why didn’t he act 20 years, 30 years, 40 years ago?’”
Garrod then asked: “Why didn’t we?”
Born in London on May 8, 1926, Attenborough grew up on the grounds of what is now the University of Leicester, where his father held a senior role. As a boy, he rode his bicycle into the countryside and collected birds’ nests, snakeskins and fossils.
“I’d find a fossil and show it to my father and he’d say ‘Good, good, tell me all about it.’ So I responded and became my own expert,” Attenborough told Smithsonian Magazine in 1981.
He studied geology and zoology at the University of Cambridge and joined the BBC in 1952, working behind the scenes on “everything from ballet to short stories.” A short time later, he was asked to produce a piece about the coelacanth, a fish described as a “living fossil” after one was caught off East Africa.
That segment, presented in the studio by Professor Julian Huxley using preserved specimens and a photograph, left Attenborough thinking television could do much more.
“I’d always wanted to do films on animals around the world,” he recalled in a 1985 interview with The Associated Press. “But the attitude was, ‘We’ve got TV cameras in the studio. What’s this about spending money abroad?’”
In 1954, he persuaded the BBC to let him travel with a London Zoo team to West Africa to collect specimens. The trip led to a decade hosting and producing Zoo Quest.
One of the defining moments of his career came in Life on Earth in 1979, when he met a family of mountain gorillas in a forest on the border of Rwanda and what was then Zaire, now Congo. In the scene, a young gorilla lies across his body while several babies try to remove his shoes.
“I honestly don’t know how long it was,’’ Attenborough later told the BBC. “I suspect it was about 10 minutes, or even a quarter of an hour. I was simply transported.”
“Extraordinary, really,’’ he said. “It was one of the most privileged moments of my life.”
Jean-Baptiste Gouyon, a professor of science communication at University College London, said Attenborough’s knowledge of television, his understanding of audiences and his commitment to science helped him become the public face of wildlife broadcasting.
“Basically he gave wildlife television a figure, a front of the house person … which has come to embody television discourse about nature,” Gouyon said.
In a recorded audio message for his birthday, Attenborough said he had expected a quiet day.
“I’ve been completely overwhelmed by birthday greetings from preschool groups to care home residents and countless individuals and families of all ages,’’ he said. “I simply can’t reply to each of you all separately, but I would like to thank you all most sincerely for your kind messages.”
Fothergill said Attenborough still wants to keep working.
“He said to me recently he feels unbelievably privileged that a man in his late 90s is still being asked to work. And, you know, he will go on forever. He will die in his safari shorts.”
Read more from Associated Press.
