Sir Jonathan Miller(1934–2019)

Jonathan Wolfe Miller was born in St John's Wood, London, on 21 July 1934, only son of Emanuel Miller, the foundational figure of post-war British child-psychiatry, and the novelist Betty Spiro. He was schooled at St Paul's School, took a Cambridge choral exhibition to St John's College in 1953, and read medicine at the Middlesex Hospital, qualifying as a doctor in 1959.

He had been writing and performing revue at Cambridge through his medical training. John Bassett brought him into the four-man satirical revue that he, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett took to the Edinburgh fringe of August 1960. Beyond the Fringe transferred to the West End and to Broadway, where it ran for fourteen months; he was twenty-eight at the end of the run and gave up the practising medical career in 1964.

He moved into producing and directing. The BBC's Monitor arts magazine took him on as a producer in 1964; he produced sixty editions and learned the studio. In 1979 the BBC gave him the executive producer's chair of the BBC Television Shakespeare, the brief to produce all thirty-seven canonical plays as a single series across six years. He produced twelve himself, including Antony and Cleopatra and King Lear with Olivier, and the series remains the standard reference performance of Shakespeare on British television.

Opera direction was the third register of his life. From 1975 he directed about a hundred and forty productions for the English National Opera, Glyndebourne, the Metropolitan Opera and La Scala. His English National Opera Mikado of 1986, set in a 1930s Mayfair grand hotel, became the longest-running opera production in British operatic history, and his 1982 Rigoletto, relocated to 1950s Little Italy, was the model of his method: making a libretto's social specifics strange to a modern audience so the music could land.

He presented the BBC's The Body in Question (1978), the corporation's foundational popular-science television series of the period, wrote the book that has stayed in print since, and continued through the 1980s and 1990s on documentary projects, Madness (1991) and Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief (2004), and opera. He was knighted in 2002 and died in Camden Town on 27 November 2019, eighty-five years old. The Miller name, the medieval occupational worker at the mill, he carried into the post-war British intellectual establishment as the four-register figure, doctor, satirist, television producer and opera director, at the head of one of the most public English cultural lives of the century.