Affable film director who made Notting Hill
Roger Michell 1956-2021
The film director Roger Michell, who has died aged 65, was initially reluctant to cast Hugh Grant in the Richard Curtis romcom Notting Hill. Expectations for the film, effectively a followup to Curtis’s 1994 smash hit Four Weddings and a Funeral, were already worryingly high, and Michell was concerned that if Grant played the charming and diffident hero for a second time, the film risked seeming even more of a sequel or re-tread; but eventually he decided that it would be mad not to give Grant a part he was born to play – and Notting Hill set a new record for the British box office. Yet Michell refused to take the credit for its success, said The Times. An affable, mildmannered man, he had no time for the idea of the director as auteur. “Film and theatre are the most collaborative of the arts,” he said. “That’s their appeal. The idea that it’s the director who owns the film is preposterous.
It’s the director’s role to marshal everyone else’s creativity.”
Roger Michell was born in 1956, in Pretoria, South Africa, where his diplomat father was on a posting, said The Daily Telegraph. Later, the family moved to Beirut, Damascus and Prague. He reckoned his interest in drama stemmed from watching his parents “perform at close quarters”; his mother would be “quivering with nerves”, he said, but would then open the door, and “become a different person for the benefit of the Greek foreign secretary”. He directed some sketches at Clifton College, Bristol, and read English at Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he immersed himself in drama. In 1978, he became an assistant director at the Royal Court, where he worked for the first time with Hanif Kureishi – who would become a regular collaborator. From 1985, he was resident director at the RSC, but when Adrian Noble took over from Terry Hands, he decided that it was time for something new – and enrolled in the BBC’s course for TV directors. His TV hits included Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, in 1993, and an acclaimed 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. It was the success of his first film, My Night with Reg, that got him the job on Notting Hill. Unusually for a film director, he liked to have a proper rehearsal period, and it tended to be this aspect of the production that he most enjoyed. “Comedy isn’t funny when you are doing it,” he said, about Notting Hill. “We rehearsed for a week and did a read-through and everyone fell about laughing. Then we started shooting and nobody laughed for months. It’s much harder to do comedies than serious films.”
In Notting Hill, Grant is seen reading Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – a reference to the fact that this was due to be Michell’s next project. He was obliged to pull out after suffering a heart attack, but by 2002 he was well enough to go to Hollywood to direct Changing Lanes, a thriller starring Samuel L. Jackson and Ben Affleck. His later films were mainly more low-key affairs, such as The Mother (another Kureishi screenplay) and Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love. He had signed up to direct the Bond film Quantum of Solace, but ultimately walked away because he felt the shooting schedule was too ambitious. He continued to direct plays, at the National and elsewhere, and made several more films including My Cousin Rachel, starring Rachel Weisz. His last film, The Duke, is scheduled for general release next year. He had two children with his first wife, the actress Kate Buffery, before their divorce in 2002; and two more with his second wife, the actress Anna Maxwell Martin, whom he had met on the set of Enduring Love. They had recently separated, but remained on good terms.