Outspoken polymath went from fringe theatre to the world’s great opera houses

Sir Jonathan Miller, who has died aged 85, was a towering, gangling figure in British culture, celebrated as a director, writer and performer on stage and screen; a public intellectual and television pundit; and a photographer, sculptor and author who just happened to be trained as a doctor, specialising in neurology.

Invariably described as a Renaissance man, Miller preferred terms like ‘‘flibbertigibbet’’, once telling People magazine, ‘‘Things are always best when there has been a careless abandon about them.’’ He sometimes had a half-dozen productions going on simultaneously across the world, and often lamented that he was misusing his time – even as he collected artistic accolades across

Europe and the

United States.

Overcoming a childhood stammer, he acquired a reputation as one of Britain’s most hypnotic and quick-witted conversationalists, turning his interviews into stream-of-consciousness conversations. In part, it was Miller’s wide-ranging interests that pulled him away from medicine. The son of an author and psychiatrist, he had qualified as a doctor but put his medical training on hold to ‘‘frisk about on a stage and do silly things’’, as he put it.

He had performed with the University of Cambridge’s Footlights theatrical club and, at the suggestion of an Edinburgh International Festival organiser, co-wrote and starred in Beyond the Fringe, with Alan Bennett, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. It premiered in Edinburgh in 1960 and later moved to London and Broadway.

The show lampooned 20th-century philosophy, nuclear weapons, British politics, race and ethnicity, and the prolonged death scenes of Shakespeare, with Miller refusing to die until he finished such lines as ‘‘now is steel ’twixt gut and bladder interposed’’. In a sequence inspired by his Lithuanian-jewish ancestry, he quipped: ‘‘I’m not really a Jew – just Jew-ish, not the whole hog.’’

The revue was credited with spurring a wave of ambitious new British satire, including the magazine Private Eye and the television shows That Was the Week That Was and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It also led Miller to begin directing, as George Devine of the Royal Court Theatre invited him to stage John Osborne’s comedy Under Plain Cover, despite his having no experience.

In London, Miller went on to work at the National Theatre in the early 1970s, serve as artistic director of the Old Vic in the late 80s, and direct television specials and six Shakespeare adaptations for the BBC. He also directed for leading opera companies – including the Royal Opera and English National Opera in London, the Metropolitan Opera in New York and La Scala in Milan – despite being unable to read music.

While medicine occasionally beckoned, leading him to research fellowships at University College London and the University of Sussex, he always returned to the theatre, searching for new ways to fuse science and art. ‘‘It is the small details, the most imperceptible things, that matter most,’’ he told the New York Times in 1998, while directing Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro at the Met. ‘‘We don’t want to talk about the good and the beautiful,’’ he added, paraphrasing the philosopher JL Austin. ‘‘We must consider first the dainty and the dumpy.’’

Jonathan Wolfe Miller was born in London. He later said that he spent much of his childhood with a nanny who beat him with a broom; he sometimes left home to loiter at railroad tracks, recording the serial numbers of passing trains. By 16 he had discovered a comic talent for mimicry, entertaining classmates at St Paul’s School in London.

While there he met Rachel Collett, whom he married in 1956. She survives him, in addition to their three children.

Miller’s early directing work included The

Merchant of Venice, which featured Laurence Olivier, in 1970. His best-known productions included a Mafia version of Verdi’s Rigoletto, and he was similarly daring in adapting Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure to Freud’s Vienna, Puccini’s Tosca to Mussolini’s Italy, and Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier to pre-world War I Europe.

He was knighted in 2002, despite being by then one of Britain’s most established antiestablishmentarians. He was not inclined to hold his tongue; he once summarised Margaret Thatcher as ‘‘loathsome, repulsive in every way’’.

His encounter with the radical Catholic Victoria Gillick on BBC2’S The Late Show in 1989 riveted viewers with what one critic described as their ‘‘passionate, electric dislike of each other’’. Hostilities continued after the show. ‘‘The trouble with you Jews is that you don’t seem to have much respect for human life,’’ Gillick was overheard saying. ‘‘If you Christians had more respect for human life, you would not have turned so many of us into lampshades,’’ came Miller’s retort.

He died after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. – Washington Post/telegraph Group