One of the most creative figures in a golden age of post-war culture, Jonathan Miller, who has died in London aged 85, was an outstanding theatre and opera director, a broadcaster, satirist, comedian and raconteur and an intellectual immersed in philosophy, medicine and the sciences.
At his happiest he was able to bring all these passions together in exciting and original productions and television programmes. On the theatre and opera stage he directed such leading artists as Sir John Gielgud, Sir Lawrence Olivier, John Cleese and Placido Domingo, Kevin Spacey and Jack Lemmon.
Miller’s astonishing career ranged from Footlights and Beyond the Fringe to writing about Freud and Darwin. He contributed to the first issue of The New York Review of Books, edited the noted BBC arts programme Monitor and presented acclaimed TV series on psychology and the history of medicine.
Eric Idle and Dudley Moore starred in different productions of his Mikado and Peter Sellers, Alan Bennett and Michael Redgrave appeared in his TV production of Alice in Wonderland.
Miller won international acclaim and was awarded honorary fellowships and a knighthood, but he also had his critics. ITV’s Spitting Image famously made fun of his range of talents. In one sketch he performed a liver transplant while simultaneously making calls to the “National Opera” and managing a mini-cab service on the side.
Born in London, Miller grew up in a well-connected Jewish family, the son of Emanuel Miller, a distinguished child psychiatrist, and Betty Miller (née Spiro), a novelist and biographer. His first home was just off Harley Street and a few streets from Broadcasting House. The two worlds of medicine and science on the one hand, and arts and the media on the other, were to dominate his life.
He studied at St Paul’s School in west London where he developed an early (and enduring) interest in the biological sciences. His contemporaries included Oliver Sacks, who became a lifelong friend. In the mid-1950s he studied medicine at St John’s College, Cambridge and became involved in the Cambridge Footlights.
After graduating in 1956 he married Helen Rachel Collet and they had three children. He qualified as a doctor in 1959 and almost immediately formed Beyond the Fringe together with Alan Bennett, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, one of the most successful comedy groups in the so-called “Satire Boom” of the early 1960s.
Miller went on to have three different careers. First, as a performer, a young comedian and later chat-show raconteur. He was a dazzling conversationalist. Alan Bennett once said that his first experience of interviews had meant “being in the shadow of Jonathan”, witnessing his verbal fireworks “and never being able to do it.”
Second, as a broadcaster, popularising science, medicine, psychology and philosophy in studio interviews like States of Mind, documentary series such as The Body in Question and one-off documentaries about how neurological damage destroys human lives, such as Ivan and Prisoner of Consciousness. These observational documentaries showed a warm, empathic side to Miller. He was not just brilliant and funny. He could also be extremely kind and warm-hearted.
Thirdly, he was an outstanding director in television drama, theatre and opera. Perhaps his greatest achievement was to bring together his different interests, using his knowledge of science, medicine and art to illuminate his theatre and opera productions. He famously took classic plays and operas and brought them to life by putting them in a different historical setting. His BBC Taming of the Shrew made Petruchio (John Cleese) an extreme 17th century Puritan; he set his ENO production of Rigoletto in 1950s Little Italy, and best known of all, his famous ENO Mikado was set in a dazzling white Grand Hotel on the south coast.
It is perhaps the range of these works that was most impressive. For the BBC he directed Michael Hordern in an adaptation of MR James’s ghost story, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, his legendary adaptation of Alice in Wonderland and a dialogue about death between James Boswell and the philosopher David Hume. For the theatre, he directed Olivier in The Merchant of Venice, Jack Lemmon in A Long Day’s Journey Into Night and a famous season at Greenwich Theatre, Family Romances, in which the main parts in Ghosts, The Seagull and Hamlet were played by the same three actors. In opera, he worked mainly with Kent Opera and the ENO, before becoming increasingly involved in Europe.
A household name, Miller was something of an outsider. He never became a national treasure like David Attenborough or his old friend Alan Bennett. In the 1980s he attacked Thatcherism and its effect on this “mean, peevish little country”. He felt part of the post-1945 settlement (the Fabian-Bloomsbury world of NW1, the NHS, the BBC and our universities) which had come under attack.
Although Miller was Jewish, he commented in a famous sketch in Beyond the Fringe, “I’m not really a Jew. Just Jew-ish. Not the whole hog, you know.” Sometimes his relationship with the Jewish community was more strained. There was something very English about him. He set his adaptation of Plato’s Symposium in a public school and Alice in Wonderland in an old country house. His sense of Englishness embraced Shakespeare, Victorian neurology and The Mikado. “Every part of my memory,” he said, “is saturated with English imagery.”
He is survived by Rachel, his wife of 60 years, and his children Tom, William and Kate.
Jonathan Miller: born July 21 1934. Died November 27 2019
