Norma Percy (born c. 1942[1]) is an American-born,documentary film maker and producer. The documentaries she has produced in collaboration withBrian Lapping have covered many of the crises of the 20th Century.[2] In 2010, she was awarded theOrwell Prize Special Prize for Lifetime Achievement.[3]
Percy was born and raised inNew York City. She studied politics atOberlin College in Ohio, later studying for a master's degree at theLondon School of Economics.[4][5] She then became a researcher at theHouse of Commons where she spent six years; in her time there, she worked as a researcher for the MPJohn Mackintosh, who recommended her to theGranada Television producerBrian Lapping when he was looking for a researcher for a documentary on the workings of Parliament calledThe State of the Nation.[4]
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Percy produced the Granada seriesEnd of Empire (1985), which explored the effects of the end of theBritish Empire in various former colonies, and worked with Lapping on the 1987drama-documentaryBreakthrough at Reykjavik, a reconstruction of theReykjavík Summit betweenRonald Reagan andMikhail 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 companyBrook Lapping.)[5]
The Percy-produced documentary seriesWatergate aired on theBBC and theDiscovery Channel in 1994. Narrated byDaniel Schorr and directed byMick Gold, this five-part series chronicled theWatergate scandal and featured exclusive interviews with many of the key participants in the events, includingH. R. Haldeman,John Ehrlichman,John Dean andG. Gordon Liddy as well as former PresidentGerald Ford.[7][8][9] The series won anEmmy Award.[5]
The Death of Yugoslavia (1995), with Lapping as co-producer, covered the events that led to thecollapse of the former Yugoslavia and the aftermath. The series again contained interviews with many of the major participants, includingSlobodan Milošević andRadovan Karadžić. The series won aBAFTA Award as Best Factual Series for 1995.[10] The Balkans were revisited in the 2001 seriesThe 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 2002BAFTA awards.[12][13]
Percy was made a Fellow of theRoyal Television Society in 1999[14] and was awarded the Judges Prize by that society at the 2010 RTS Awards.[15] In 2009, at theGrierson Awards, she, along with colleagues from theBrook Lapping production company, won theBest Documentary Series award forIran 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] TheSpecial Prize for Lifetime Achievement was given to her at theOrwell 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 celebrityautobiography, 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 geneticistSteve Jones; the couple had lived together since 1977.[20]
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