Sir Jonathan Miller, after qualifying in medicine and completing appointments as a junior doctor, changed career direction to become one of the most outstanding creative talents of his generation. His highly original mind led him to make significant contributions to cultural life in Britain and abroad, first as a performer and then as a director of television documentaries, of theatre and, above all, of classical opera.
Miller was born in London, the child of two intellectual Jewish parents. His father, Emanuel Miller played an important part in the early development of child and adolescent psychiatry in the UK. As well as being an accomplished artist, he had a profound knowledge of anthropology and history. Miller’s mother, Betty Miller née Bergson-Spiro, was a novelist and literary critic, who wrote a well-regarded portrait of the poet, Robert Browning. She suffered from young-onset dementia.
After education at St Paul’s School, London, where he met his lifelong friend Oliver Sacks and became fascinated with the biological sciences, Miller won an open scholarship to St John’s College, Cambridge. At Cambridge, where his distinctive appearance (very tall, ginger hair, jeans and bare foot in the street) made him stand out, he wrote sketches for and acted in Footlights revues. After graduating with a degree in natural sciences, he then transferred to UCH Medical School, London, for clinical training. An outstanding medical student, he introduced new cultural activities into the school with evenings of poetry and prose and lectures by outstanding literary figures. He also edited the UCH magazine and directed the 1957 Christmas revue. The final, hilarious sketch of this revue, in which, to the accompaniment of a rendering of The twelve days of Christmas, he played the recipient of increasingly unwelcome gifts culminating in 12 drummers drumming, is still remembered by those who saw it.
After qualification, he was appointed as a house physician to the neurology department at the Central Middlesex Hospital and house surgeon to the surgical unit at UCH. It was while he was working as a house surgeon that he received an invitation to join Peter Cook, Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore in an Edinburgh Festival fringe satire, Beyond the Fringe. This show, often regarded as having transformed the nature of British satire, was so successful that it transferred for long runs to the London stage and then to Broadway.
On his return to London, he was invited to produce the prestigious television arts programme, Monitor. His debut as a theatre director began in 1962 with a play by John Osborne at the Royal Court Theatre. His television production of Alice in wonderland (1966), starring Peter Sellers and John Gielgud, won wide critical acclaim. Sir Laurence Olivier, the first director of the National Theatre, invited him to be an assistant director and Miller directed Olivier as Shylock in a notable production of The merchant of Venice.
From 1974, he concentrated especially on operatic productions, first at Kent Opera and Glyndebourne, and then, over a long period, at the English National Opera (ENO). His ground-breaking ENO productions of Rigoletto, La bohème and The mikado have been revived on numerous occasions, the latter 15 times over 30 years. As well as the Royal Opera House, London, Miller also directed operas in countless overseas venues including the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and most of the major opera houses in Europe. He was also a creative director of Shakespeare, directing six plays in the BBC Television Shakespeare project from 1978 to 1985 and many stage productions.
Miller’s experience in clinical neurology was always influential in his directorial style, both in theatre and opera productions. He would draw the attention of actors to the importance of apparently unconscious movements of the hands to express their feelings and thoughts and would imitate the classical gait of neurological conditions to help make their performances more life-like. He drew on the way patients with Parkinson’s disease could sometimes only initiate a movement by deliberating thinking of something else as a technique for actors who seemed ‘stuck’ in how to perform a particular scene. He also drew on his medical knowledge in some of the documentary programmes he produced. This was particularly the case for the highly successful The body in question (1978), Ivan (1984), Born talking: a personal inquiry into language (1990) and Madness (1991).
Miller did not leave medicine without regret. He constantly hankered after an academic career in some branch of the subject, especially neuropsychology. Indeed, in the early eighties he took time off directing to study neuropsychology, first at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario and then at the University of Sussex. In conversation, he constantly returned to his wish to contribute to medical knowledge. He probably came nearest to this in his published discussions of the understanding of consciousness, in which he took a ‘mysterian’ position, proposing the human brain did not have the potential for solving the problem of conscious thought.
Not surprisingly, Miller was asked to accept honorific positions by a number of voluntary organisations. A convinced atheist (he produced Atheism: a rough history of disbelief for BBC Four), he served as president of the British Humanist Association. He was also an active president of the Alzheimer’s Society. In this capacity, he helped to put the Society on the map in the 1990s with frequent television appearances. He was a strong advocate for meeting the needs of carers which, he thought, should take precedence over everything else, including research activity.
In his later years, Miller experimented with various forms of artwork, sculpting with scrap iron and making collages with wooden blocks and other materials. He held two one-man shows of his artwork.
Miller married Rachel Collet, a general practitioner, in 1956. He suffered from Alzheimer’s disease in his last years and died at home. Rachel survived him, as do their three children, Kate, Tom and William, and four grandchildren. William has written an account of his childhood with his parents, Gloucester Crescent: me, my dad and other grown-ups (London, Profile Books, 2018).
Philip Graham
[BBC News Obituary: Jonathan Miller 27 November 2019 www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-21144364 – accessed 13 February 2020; The Guardian 27 November 2019 www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/nov/27/sir-jonathan-miller-obituary – accessed 13 February 2020; The Times 27 November 2019 www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jonathan-miller-dm98cmt5t – accessed 13 February 2020; The Telegraph 27 November 2019 www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/11/27/sir-jonathan-miller-theatre-director-writer-dies-aged-85/ – accessed 13 February 2020; The New York Times 27 November 2019 www.nytimes.com/2019/11/27/theater/jonathan-miller-dead.html – accessed 13 February 2020; The Independent 28 November 2019 www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/jonathan-miller-death-theatre-director-satirist-beyond-the-fringe-opera-a9223241.html – accessed 13 February 2020; The Stage 28 November 2019 www.thestage.co.uk/features/obituaries/2019/obituary-jonathan-miller-director-writer-and-actor/ – accessed 13 February 2020]