Sir Jonathan Miller(1934–2019)

Jonathan Wolfe Miller was born at the small private nursing home on Acacia Road, St John's Wood, on 21 July 1934, only son of Emanuel Miller, a German-Jewish émigré child psychiatrist of distinction (the foundational figure of post-war British child-psychiatry; his clinic at the East End East London Child Guidance Clinic ran from 1927 to 1972), and Betty Spiro, a novelist and biographer of Henry James. The household was the standard inter-war Anglo-Jewish intellectual one: visiting Vienna émigrés on the front room sofa, the *Times Literary Supplement* read at breakfast, the boy taken to King's College Chapel choir Evensongs at the age of seven by his choirmaster grandfather Salaman Spiro. He was schooled at St Paul's School in west London from thirteen, took a Cambridge Choral Exhibition to St John's College in 1953, and read medicine at the Middlesex Hospital from 1956 to 1959, qualifying MB BChir in 1959. He was, by his own subsequent description, never wholly comfortable as a doctor.

He had been writing and performing revue sketches at Cambridge through the undergraduate years. The Footlights revue club at Trinity-and-King's-and-St John's had taken him in at twenty in 1953 and he had been a Footlights member through his medical training. John Bassett, the Cambridge organist who had been the previous year's musical director of the Edinburgh International Festival, brought him into the four-man satirical revue that Peter Cook of Pembroke, Dudley Moore of Magdalen, Alan Bennett of Exeter and Jonathan Miller of St John's took to the Edinburgh fringe of August 1960. *Beyond the Fringe* opened at the Lyceum Edinburgh on 22 August, transferred to the Fortune Theatre London in May 1961, opened on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre in October 1962 and ran there for fourteen months. He was twenty-eight at the end of the Broadway run. The medicine had become impossible to combine with the stage life and he gave up the practising medical career formally in 1964.

He moved into producing and directing. The *Monitor* arts magazine at the BBC took him on as a producer in 1964 under Huw Wheldon; he produced sixty editions of *Monitor* across the next four years and learned, by his own subsequent account, how to organise the studio of a television-production crew. The Shakespeare project at the BBC came in 1979 when the corporation gave him the executive producer's chair of the BBC Television Shakespeare, the brief to produce all thirty-seven of the canonical Shakespeare plays as a single television series across six years. He produced twelve of the thirty-seven himself (*Antony and Cleopatra* and *King Lear* both with Olivier among them), and ran the series-management role through the editorial-and-commissioning side of the rest. The Shakespeare project, finished in 1985, remains the standard reference performance of the canonical Shakespeare on British television.

The opera-directing career was the third register of his adult life. He directed his first opera (Verdi's *Rigoletto* at the Kent Opera) in 1975 and across the following thirty years directed about a hundred and forty productions for the English National Opera, Glyndebourne, Scottish Opera, the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala and the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. The English National Opera *Mikado* of 1986, set in a 1930s Mayfair grand hotel and the work that became the longest-running opera production in British operatic history, was Miller's. The English National Opera *Rigoletto* of 1982, set in 1950s Little Italy Manhattan, was the foundational example of his method (taking a Verdi or Mozart libretto and re-locating it on the working principle that the cultural-and-social specifics of the libretto needed to be made strange to a modern audience for the music to land properly).

He presented the BBC's *The Body in Question* (1978), the thirteen-part television-documentary series on the human body that the post-war BBC produced as the broadcaster's foundational popular-science series of the period. He wrote the accompanying book that has stayed in print across the four decades since. He continued working through the 1980s and 1990s on a continuous rotation between BBC television documentary projects (*Madness*, 1991; *Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief*, 2004), and opera direction across the British and European houses. He was knighted in 2002. He died at the small house in Camden Town he had shared with his wife Rachel Collet (a fellow former Middlesex Hospital medical student whom he had married in 1956) since the 1970s, on 27 November 2019, eighty-five years old, of Alzheimer's complications. The Miller name in its English-side catalogue is the medieval occupational *miller*, the worker at the watermill or the windmill, scattered as a surname across every parish that had a mill in the medieval economy; he carried the urban-Jewish-émigré variant of it into the post-war British intellectual-cultural establishment as the four-register figure (doctor, satirist, television producer, opera director) at the head of one of the most-public English-cultural lives of the century.