William Cran was a rising star of documentary television when David Fanning, a Boston-based producer, asked him to join a new project in 1977. At 32 years old, he had already produced about 100 short films and 15 longer documentaries in 21 countries across four continents, covering everything from Saudi Arabia’s oil rush to the fitful end of Portugal’s empire.

The new programme was called World. It aimed to distil global trends and eventually morphed into PBS’s Frontline, the award-winning documentary series. Fanning wanted Cran to produce a film about an impoverished 83-year-old Indian clerk, whose tale illustrated life on the subcontinent.

Cran arrived in Delhi without a script, story or any filming locations in mind, but had an ample budget and confidence in his talents. “We’ll simply have to fly by the seat of our pants all the way,” he said before setting out. The resulting documentary, made with the writer Ved Mehta, won a duPont-Columbia award, American broadcasting’s equivalent of the Pulitzer prize.

Cran would produce more than 20 films for Frontline, ranging from the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia and sexual abuse of migrant workers to a study of Jesus Christ, which The New York Times called “a revelation of what television can be”. For the series he also made a film about the drug lord Pablo Escobar. Years later, parts of the Escobar film were reproduced by the Netflix series Narcos.

Across these different subjects, Cran displayed a remarkable ability to gain access to his interviewees and get them to open up. “When people see that the camera is turned on, they start behaving like their real selves,” he said. “All the dead, superficial stuff falls off.”

Cran had a knack for finding compelling storylines to animate his subjects. On the surface, these could appear dry. One example is Commanding Heights, a six-hour-long PBS series that charted the rise of free market economics, world trade and globalisation, based on the book of the same name by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw. For it, Cran went to villages to capture the impact of economic change on ordinary people.

He also explored the relationship between Friedrich Hayek, the champion of modern free-market economics, and John Maynard Keynes, who called for government intervention in markets. During the Second World War the pair, whose battle of ideas shaped the 20th century, wound up on the roof of King’s College, Cambridge, as air wardens watching for German bombers.

In The Story of English, a nine-parter that was broadcast on the BBC in 1986, he studied how a language became the world’s common tongue. The BBC2 controller who commissioned the series thought it should be a radio programme, since it lacked obvious visual elements. “He didn’t think there was anyone bright enough to make it work, apart from one person — and that was Bill,” said Robert McCrum, an editor at Faber who worked on the series.

In Cran’s hands, the subject came alive. Over three and a half years, the team interviewed Californian surfers, Caribbean poets, west African chiefs and Indian scribes. The series treated English as a vibrant, living language that has evolved across diverse cultures and eschewed the dry terms of philology tutorials.

“Real estate agents say ‘Location, location, location’,” said Cran. “For me, it’s story, story, story … It all flows from that. You look at the subject, you shape it into a series of narratives, a series of stories you can tell. Once you’ve got that, then you’ve got the beginning. You’re lined up.”

Over his career, Cran produced more than 50 documentaries. He poured much time and energy into each one, although doubt sometimes crept in. While shooting the documentary about the Indian clerk, he almost abandoned the idea completely before Mehta persuaded him to stick with it. “You fall in love with every project you do,” he said. “And every film you make, you think it is going to be the best film ever made. And halfway through, you just hope it’ll get made at all.” He added: “It’s great to be stretched, to have to use your entire intelligence and talent to try and make something really work. It’s a great way to spend a couple of years of your life. You know it’s not trivial.”

Cran’s work brought several accolades. He won four Emmys, four duPonts, two Peabodys, two Golden Gate awards and the Overseas Press Club award, making him one of the most decorated film-makers of his generation. He also helped to nurture the careers of others, especially young women.

Cran was a private man. He forged tight bonds with his colleagues, but eschewed the limelight, rarely giving interviews or attending festivals to promote his work. These activities ate up time, which he preferred to spend making films. As a result, his public profile was low, even if he was revered in the profession. “He’s really the most eminent film-maker you’ve never heard of,” said his widow, Vicki Barker, a journalist for CBS Radio and NPR.

William Cran was born in 1945 in Hobart, Tasmania. His mother, Jean, was a teacher. His father, John, was a university lecturer. When Cran was six, John received a job offer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he had previously worked. The family travelled there via London, but John could not get a US visa for his son, so Cran stayed in England with his mother.

At his south London primary school, the tousle-haired Cran stuck out with his strong Australian accent. Fearing he would be bullied, his parents took him to elocution lessons. By the time he arrived at Westminster School, where he was scholar and head boy, he spoke the sort of RP English favoured by BBC newsreaders of the day.

After Westminster he read classics at Magdalen College, Oxford. Cran’s love of the ancient world would stay with him throughout his life: on long drives to shooting locations, he would muse on the works of Suetonius, Tacitus and Pliny the Elder, while puffing on his trademark pipe. Later he would produce a series on the military campaigns of Emperor Trajan for the BBC.

During his younger years, Cran also dabbled in theatre. At Oxford he acted in and directed several plays and took two productions to London. These earned him a job offer from the Royal Shakespeare Company but affected his studies. When he grumbled about his 2:1 degree, his tutor told him he would have got a first if he had spent less time on his theatrical pursuits.

He turned down Shakespeare for the BBC, winning one of six spots on its prestigious trainee programme out of more than 900 applicants. It was at the dawn of the Troubles, and Cran cut his teeth in Northern Ireland, spending several months there in his first year with the corporation. As a young producer, working alongside David Dimbleby, he also helped to pioneer the use of reconstructions in factual programmes, including a documentary that investigated the murder of a postmaster in Luton.

After eight years with the BBC, Cran grew restless. He felt they were trying to mould him into a senior administrator, which would have consigned him to a life of desk work. One day, someone from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation phoned, asking if the BBC could recommend someone for The Fifth Estate, a new investigative programme. Cran put himself forward.

It was a choice that baffled his bosses, but one he never regretted. “I could have had a lifelong career with the BBC, but I found it was just too comfortable a slot,” he said in 1978. “No one ever leaves the BBC, and because I did, my stock has been going up with them ever since. One way to get people to want you is to leave them.”

At CBC he investigated how tobacco from Rhodesia, whose white minority government was under UN actions, ended up in Canada. Soon after joining, he went freelance. Cran believed Fanning asked him to work on World because Fanning had seen The Agony of Cyprus, a documentary about the grief of families torn apart by the island’s conflict. Cran considered it one of his best films, but it was so harrowing he avoided watching it when it was shown on TV.

He made his name working on PBS’s Frontline. It included 88 Seconds in Greensboro about a clash between communists and the Ku Klux Klan during a march in North Carolina in 1979 that left five people dead. An all-white jury acquitted six Klansmen of the killings, saying they had acted in self-defence. Cran’s documentary unearthed evidence that the police knew there was a possibility of violence through an informer but did nothing to stop it.

The film encapsulated Cran’s ability to cut straight to the heart of a story, containing an in-depth interview with the informer. This knack was also on display in Jihad: The Men and Ideas Behind Al Qaeda, broadcast in 2006 and featuring people who had personally known Osama bin Laden. His last series, for Al Jazeera, investigated the Lockerbie bombing.

Cran’s first marriage to Araminta Wordsworth ended in divorce. His second wife, Stephanie Tepper, was an editor at the station that made World and later worked with him on several films. Tepper and Cran had three daughters: Jessica and twins Chloe and Rebecca. Tepper died in 1997 of cancer when their children were aged 12 and four, and for much of his career Cran was a single parent.

His third wife, Polly Bide, was a television executive. She too died of cancer. Both marriages had been happy and left Cran devastated. “He went through a very long period in the middle of his career suffering the most terrible grief, and he got through it with astonishing nobility of spirit,” recalled McCrum.

Cran met Barker, who survives him, at a dinner party in London in 2003. They wed in 2014. Shortly afterwards, Cran was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He spent part of his later years sipping cocktails and watching westerns with friends and taking trips on the Thames with Barker in their boat, Riverrun.

William Cran, documentary maker, was born on December 11, 1945. He died on June 4, 2025, aged 79, after living with Parkinson’s disease for a decade