Roger Michell
Film and theatre director who made the hit comedy Notting Hill but walked away from a Bond movie
ROGER MICHELL, the director, who has died aged 65, had a widely varied career in the theatre and the cinema but is likely to be best remembered for the romantic comedy Notting Hill, with Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts, which in 1999 became the most successful British film at the box office to date.
Michell was adamant that making a film should be a collaborative process. He shied away from anything that smacked of the director as auteur rather than his being at the service of the story. Even so, Notting Hill bore his characteristic hallmarks. These were an ability to explore how the English conduct themselves, without wholly giving in to Hollywood’s notion of that, and an insistence that there was no distinction between art and entertainment.
Affable and patient, he brought on to the set disciplines that he valued from the stage. He often worked with the same collaborators, including the writer Hanif Kureishi, the playwright Joe Penhall, and a group of actors that included Daniel Craig and Rhys Ifans. He had directed Ifans in Under Milk Wood, and had the slovenly flatmate character in Notting Hill changed from being Scots to Welsh so as to cast him.
Michell also liked to spend a week in rehearsal before shooting started. While some film actors feel such preparation militates against spontaneity, it was a tribute to Michell’s skills that he was, for instance, able to convince Julia Roberts to try it for the first time.
His own favourite director was Federico Fellini – Michell once made a midwinter pilgrimage to the Italian’s grave in Rimini. And he thought of his work as “privileged tourism”. “You get to dive into other societies,” he told the Telegraph in 2002, “and try to live that experience vicariously through your films.”
Roger Michell was born on June 5 1956 in Pretoria, South Africa. His father, Harry, who had won the DFC during the Second World War, was a British diplomat, and the family later lived in Beirut and Damascus.
In 1968, when his father was chargé d’affaires at the embassy in Prague, Roger witnessed the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia. He later reflected that his interest in acting stemmed from watching “my parents perform at close quarters, watching them have to be other people”.
“My family is a bit like that, in private anyway,” he said. “But to see my mother quivering with nerves and then opening the door and becoming a different person for the benefit of the Greek Foreign Secretary …”
By eight, he was making up short plays about ghosts, and at assembly at Clifton College, where he was educated, he directed some sketches by Harold Pinter. The playwright’s fascination with the codes of language – with people not saying what they meant – resonated with Michell and he went on to study English at Queens’ College Cambridge.
Contemporaries included Jimmy Mulville and Griff Rhys Jones. Michell directed many student plays, winning an award at the Edinburgh Fringe. He also won a drink with Trevor Nunn, who strongly advised him against a career as a director because of its emotional toll. “So of course I ignored him,” confessed Michell.
In 1978 he began as an assistant director at the Royal Court Theatre, London. Danny Boyle was his stage manager and it was there he began to collaborate with Hanif Kureishi. He also worked with Samuel Beckett, John Osborne and Max Stafford-clark.
After a year, however, Michell left to stage his production of Private Dick, his play about Raymond Chandler. It was seen in the West End with Robert Powell as Philip Marlowe.
Thereafter, he spent six years as a director with the Royal Shakespeare Company. When Adrian Noble became its artistic director in 1991, Michell left and took the BBC’S course for prospective television directors. He and Kureishi then adapted the latter’s novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, as a drama series. Starring Naveen Andrews, and with a soundtrack from David Bowie, this was broadcast to acclaim on BBC Two in 1993.
It was followed by Michell’s first film (also for the BBC), his notably naturalistic rendition of Persuasion
(1995). Made at the height of “Austenmania” – its production coincided with Pride and Prejudice,
featuring Colin Firth, and there was competition between the two for costumes – it starred Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds and won praise for Michell’s faithfulness to the subtleties of the text.
It was Michell’s feel for the comedy in his film version of My Night with Reg
(1996), Kevin Elyot’s play about the advent of Aids, that led to his being chosen to direct Notting Hill. Before that, he worked for several years at the National Theatre, notably with Bill Nighy, Andrew Lincoln and Chiwetel Ejiofor on Blue/orange, Joe Penhall’s award-winning play about mental health and racism.
An in-joke was inserted into the final scene of Notting Hill, with Hugh Grant shown reading what was slated to be Michell’s next film for Working Title: Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. But at the age of 43, Michell – so keen a smoker that he would snap the filters off his cigarettes – then had a heart attack while on a train to Paris.
The taxing shoot in Greece of Louis de Bernières’s novel was entrusted instead to Michell’s fellow Old Cliftonian John Madden, though with results widely considered disappointing.
Michell himself, having recovered, then made a rare venture to Hollywood for the anger management thriller
Changing Lanes (2002), with Ben Affleck and Samuel L Jackson (whom the director found “rather gauche and shy” beneath a “superabundance of front”).
Thereafter, as he embarked on a second marriage, Michell chose to work almost entirely on Britain, and so inevitably on smaller productions. These included The Mother (2003), about a reverse May-december relationship, with Daniel Craig, who with Rhys Ifans also appeared in
Enduring Love (2004), the adaptation of Ian Mcewan’s psychological thriller.
Michell then agreed to direct Craig as James Bond in Quantum of Solace (2008). Yet his preference for thorough preparation was at odds with a timetable which envisioned much improvisation. He eventually walked away over concerns about the readiness of the script.
After another May-december film,
Venus (2006), which brought Peter O’toole his final Oscar nomination as a dying pensioner infatuated with a young Jodie Whittaker, Michell returned to the theatre. He directed several more plays by Joe Penhall, including Mood Music at the Old Vic and Birthday at the Royal Court.
Later films included Morning Glory (2010), with Harrison Ford as a television news anchor, and Le Week-end (2013), another collaboration with Kureishi, starring Lindsay Duncan and Jim Broadbent. The next year he made the television drama The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies, starring Jason Watkins as Michell’s former teacher, vilified in the press during the hunt for the murderer of Joanna Yeates in 2010.
My Cousin Rachel (2017), with Rachel Weisz as Daphne du Maurier’s ambiguous protagonist, ushered in a highly productive late spell. This included a much-watched documentary about four great contemporary actresses, Nothing Like a Dame (2018), and Blackbird (2019) a drama about euthanasia starring Kate Winslet.
Michell’s final feature film, The Duke, starring Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren and based on the theft from the National Gallery in 1961 of the portrait of the Duke of Wellington, is due for release shortly. He was also at work on Elizabeth, an archive-based documentary on the Queen for release late this year or early next.
Roger Michell’s first marriage, to Kate Buffery, the actress, with whom he had a son and a daughter, ended in divorce in 2002. He then married Anna Maxwell Martin, perhaps best known for her role in Line of Duty, with whom he had two daughters, although latterly they had separated.
Roger Michell, born June 5 1956, died September 22 2021