Lynn Ruth Miller
Journalist who overcame illness and unhappy marriages to find a new life as a stand-up comedian
LYNN RUTH MILLER, who has died aged 87, was billed as “the world’s oldest performing comedienne,” her humour exploiting the comedy value of being both old and totally outrageous. Originally from Ohio, Lynn Ruth Miller only became a cabaret artist when she was 71, saying she “didn’t want to peak too soon”. In 2013, her one-woman show, “Granny’s Gone Wild” – a melange of jokes about geriatric sex and imminent death (“I read the obituaries column for romantic leads”), gravel-voiced jazz songs full of carpe diem
“attitude”, and a (rather chaste) striptease – won a cabaret award at the Edinburgh Fringe, though she subsequently got a thumbs-down from Simon Cowell on Britain’s Got Talent.
“All she really needs to do to impress her audience is exist, and she knows it,” observed the Telegraph’s Tristram Fane Saunders after attending one of her gigs at the Phoenix Arts Club last October: “‘Gasp as she bends to tie a shoelace!’ an ironic voice-over boomed, introducing her like a kind of carnival attraction. ‘See how she breathes totally unaided!’”
Her songs were the vehicle for stories of her roller-coaster life, which, as she recounted in her 2020 memoir, Getting the Last Laugh, began on October 11 1933 in Toledo, Ohio. Though born into a middleclass Jewish household, her childhood was, by her own account, “riddled with fear”, her family consisting of “an angry, insecure mother, a vindictive sister and a father too busy to know I existed”.
She suffered alternating anorexia and bulimia from the age of 16, and attempted suicide several times in her 20s and 30s. By 29 she had divorced two husbands (the first hit her, the second turned out to be gay). Later, she nearly died in a car crash.
She wanted to be a journalist, but ended up teaching after qualifying in education at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and taking a Master’s degree at the University of Toledo, Ohio.
After the end of her second marriage, she enrolled at Stanford, where she got another Master’s, in Communications, graduating top of her class. But with so many degrees she found she was overqualified for entry-level jobs in journalism, so she moved back to Ohio and taught Humanities at the University of Toledo, while trying to sell self-published books out of a suitcase.
One turning point came when she was 36: as she lay in hospital weighing less than four stone, her body shutting down from malnutrition, doctors told her she would die. “I realised how superficial it was to think that whether I was fat or thin could make me successful,” she said. She discharged herself and overcame her anorexia, though it took her 10 years.
In 1980, inspired by John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, she bundled her dogs into a truck, bought a trailer and took off for California, settling in Pacifica – the perfect place, she found, for “a low-income, single, middle-aged woman with no family. I could usher at the theatre, symphony and opera, learn to tap dance – really live my life.”
She started writing columns for the Pacifica Tribune that were eventually published as books, Thoughts While Walking the Dog (1991) and More Thoughts While Walking the Dog (2003). She taught painting, held exhibitions in local galleries and published an autobiographical novel,
Starving Hearts.
Aged 71, she was writing a feature about the San Francisco Comedy College when she decided, to give the piece some colour, to enrol on the course. “Lynn Ruth is the only member of our troupe who might die on stage,” announced her teacher. “But the truth is,” she recalled, “I did not die. Instead, I began to live.”
At the of 80 she crossed the Atlantic on the promise from a television director of a visa, “a beautiful home, and a wonderful salary”. The beautiful home was a dingy flat above a Brighton chippy and the visa never materialised, but her first UK gig was at the Edinburgh Fringe, and her comedy career took off. To her surprise she found that “British people like eccentric old ladies”.
She later moved to London, performed everywhere from Harrogate to Hanoi, and even made an appearance on Channel 4’s
First Dates, telling the waiter: “The nice thing about dating at my age is you don’t have to meet their parents.”
She caught Covid during the pandemic, but thanks to having “the immune system of an elephant”, soon recovered and went on to perform a skit on Youtube, with the refrain: “Don’t lock me down!”
Lynn Ruth Miller had been due to record a stand-up special for Radio 4 on July 2, with the working title “Not Dead Yet”, but suffered a “mild” heart attack shortly before recording, causing the session to be postponed. Subsequently she was diagnosed with cancer.
Lynn Ruth Miller, born October 11 1933, died September 7 2021