Satirist who became one of Britain’s great public intellectuals
Jonathan Miller, who has died aged 85, was one of the great polymaths of the last century. A qualified doctor, he made his name as a satirist, before turning his attention to TV, theatre and opera. His intellectual curiosity was almost unlimited, but he was unlucky enough to have been born in a country where intellectuals are regarded with suspicion, said The Times. He was often a target for mockery (Private Eye skewered him as “Dr Jonathan”), and was thin-skinned enough to mind. “There is a tremendous feeling in England that if you think and enjoy thinking, you are arrogant, pretentious or befuddled by your own notions,” he noted. “Too clever by half, they say.”
Born in 1934, Miller grew up in north London. His father was an eminent psychiatrist, his mother a writer. The family was Jewish, but not very observant and he grew up to be an atheist, with a natural disdain for authority. At St Paul’s School he formed lifelong friendships with the neuroscientist Oliver Sacks and the writer Eric Korn. At Cambridge, he read natural sciences, and became a member of both The Apostles and Footlights, performing to great acclaim in revue. Still, he continued with his medical training (specialising in neurology) until, in 1960, he was persuaded to team up with Alan Bennett, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore for the groundbreaking revue Beyond the Fringe. (It was in one of its skits that he uttered the famous line that he was not really a Jew, but only “Jew-ish”.) Having made enough money from its US tour to buy a house in Gloucester Crescent, in
London NW1, he then abandoned medicine to direct films for the BBC. His triumphs included an all-star Alice in Wonderland, and Whistle and
I’ll Come to You, a chilling adaptation of an M.R. James story with Michael Hordern. In the early 1970s – after a brief stint as a research fellow at University College London – he became associate director of the National Theatre. “Jonathan excited us beyond measure by the limitless variety, the originality and the fascinating colour in the expression of his ideas,” Laurence Olivier recalled. But Miller – a “champion feuder” who never minced his words – quit when Peter Hall took over, said The Daily Telegraph. He went back to academia, before returning to the BBC in 1978 to make his highly regarded science documentary series The Body in Question, “the breadth of which appealed to his ‘grasshopper’ nature”.
Miller could not read music, and had only seen one opera, aged 14. Nevertheless, from the mid-1970s he started directing opera too. Among his most memorable productions was his Mafiosi
Rigoletto, for the ENO. He worked often for the ENO; he was scathing, however, about the Glyndebourne set. “They’d cross a field of pus to go to a country house,” he said. Easily riled by bad press, he threatened, in the 1990s, to leave this “mean, peevish little country with its acid rain of criticism and condescension”. Yet he was deeply self-critical, and wondered if he should have resisted the lure of the arts and stuck to his original vocation. Miller was married to Rachel Collet, a GP, for more than 50 years. She survives him, along with their three children.