Arts world mourns loss of ‘polymath’ Miller
The supremely talented writer, director, humourist and doctor was a dazzling genius
SIR JONATHAN MILLER was hailed for his contribution to Britain’s cultural life as his family announced yesterday that he had died after a long battle with Alzheimer’s.
Miller was a theatre and opera director, satirist, actor, presenter and man of medicine to name but a few of the pursuits in his varied career.
Alongside Dudley Moore, Peter Cook and Alan Bennett, he first gained fame in the early Sixties in Beyond the Fringe. He set aside the medical qualifications from Cambridge University – although he would return to the subject in his later years – to embrace the arts, his brilliant mind elevating him to the status of public intellectual.
He worked at the National Theatre, Old Vic, Royal Opera House, English National Opera and the BBC in Britain, and directed operas at La Scala, the Vienna State Opera and the New York Met.
His family said: “Our father died this morning peacefully at home with his family around him.
“He was 85 and leaves his wife, Rachel, and children Tom, William and Kate. His death is a great loss to our family and friends and will leave a huge hole in our lives.”
Lord Hall of Birkenhead, director-general of the BBC, called Miller “a creative genius whose imagination knew no bounds” and who “brought arts and culture to millions”.
One of his final projects was a production of King Lear at the Viaduct in Halifax, starring his friend Barrie Rutter, who said last night: “He hated the term ‘polymath’; he hated ‘Renaissance man’, too. He called it sloppy thinking – but secretly, yes, he was. He could take on all art forms in a wonderful way of erudition, enlightenment and entertainment.
“When we were doing [2013 play] Rutherford and Son in Halifax, I said, ‘You’re a doctor – why do you smoke?’ He said, ‘I shall soon be 80, I don’t want to be 90.’”
The Old Vic, where Miller was artistic director in the Nineties, said he would be “sorely missed” and ENO said his productions remained staples of the company’s repertoire.
Oliver Mears, director at the Royal Opera House, said: “He was one of the most important figures in British theatre and opera of the past half century. Combining a supreme intellect with a consistently irreverent perspective, formed from his experiences in both comedy and medicine, he shone a unique light on our art form.”
It’s right to use the word brilliant about Jonathan Miller. He illuminated every conversation in which he took part. He was like a box of fireworks in the eruption of his ideas. The wonderful thing was that these ideas stretched from neurology to poetry, from Verdi to Pete and Dud, from productions with Laurence Olivier to the unforgettable relocating of opera. His Rigoletto at ENO wholly re-energised the original without in any way blemishing it, tarting it up or dumbing it down.
He was born into a Jewish family, although he was a resolute atheist and made programmes about that. He was trained in medicine at Cambridge and then, as it were with a flip of his mind, he was starring in one of the most successful revues of the last few generations, Beyond the Fringe, which started at the Edinburgh Festival in 1960, stormed the West End and then seized centre stage in New York.
I first met him when he took over as editor of the arts show Monitor in 1965. Huw Wheldon was moving upwards in the BBC hierarchy and sought out Jonathan as his successor. I was a producer in that department at the time alongside Ken Russell, David Jones, Humphrey Burton and others and he arrived frankly like a bat out of hell. He called a meeting of the arts department and it was a two-hour solo performance in Enlightenment thought, the characters in Charles Dickens, Robert Lowell’s poetry, the latest developments in Oliver Sacks’s (his closest friend) views on the mind, and so on. All we wished was that we had brought TV cameras into the room. We had never heard anything like it – the range, the energy, the highmindedness and the humour.
He took Monitor to the heart of the New York intellectual scene and that became his character for a while, but I think he was soon tempted to move on or rather move away – because there was the constant pull back to medicine. He was offered a research fellowship in medicine at University College London from 1970 to 1973, for instance. I remember meeting him at that time outside Goodge Street station when we were both heading north on the Underground. He suggested that we walk and on the way he delivered an exhortation on the primacy of science, especially medical science, and the deeper interest it had for him and the significance it had for the future. To this he would dedicate his whole life now. But when we got to Camden Town he turned off and I had about another mile or so uphill to go. His parting shot was to ask me to listen out for this programme that he was making for Radio 3, and that production he was doing for the Old Vic and this documentary he was making for the
BBC. He couldn’t stop dancing from one thing to the other and it seemed impossible for him to be faithful to either medicine or the arts.
With his production of Alice in Wonderland – an amazing feat for someone who had never before directed a film – he was opening up new paths of possibility in television. There was nothing that he would not turn his mind to, no subject seemed to daunt him – a series on madness, Monteverdi’s L’orfeo.
He was also totally unafraid of appearing on the most popular sort of television – he was the most frequent guest on Michael Parkinson’s late-night talk show where he entranced millions with the speed of his wit and the breadth of his references.
He could be furious with people who did not like his work. In fact, furious is rather a kind word for some of his excoriating judgments, especially on a critic who dared even to wag a finger at him. But that was only a small part of the flow that was so much to do with his profound delight in knowledge, in the connections between disciplines, and in his own extraordinary skill in presenting all this in such entertaining high style.
I never left his company without feeling grateful that he was around and smiling to myself about some of the comments – often the most colourfully damaging ones that he had made along the way.
His family life was rich, private and, I think, very stabilising. As was the depth of his friendship with his very close neighbour – two or three doors away for many years – Alan Bennett. Alan’s ever-growing extraordinary talent seemed to be the perfect counterpart to the dazzle of Jonathan. But it seemed to me that both of them worked through a genius singular to each of them which was so nourishing for them both.
I have never met anyone else with Jonathan’s intellectual energy and curiosity – the range of it, the delight in it, and the way in which he often (so theatrically in soaring monologues) expressed it.
On Parkinson’s show he entranced millions with the speed of his thought and the breadth of his references