A personal response from JR's Arts Editor Judi Herman, who interviewed Miller at his London home in 2015
Jonathan Miller called himself "Jew-ish" – a useful coining that, in today’s speak, "went viral". What he hated was being called a polymath or an intellectual.
I first fell for Miller – along with his co-conspirators Alan Bennett, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore – thanks to Beyond the Fringe. I could hardly believe what I was hearing and seeing through tears of laughter. Scurrilously witty stuff, brilliantly performed by guys not afraid to show their scholarship really did it for me.
I suspect that the screamingly funny send up of Shakespeare’s History plays was a Miller original. He liked to underpin everything with erudition and experience. Famously he was training as a neurologist, when finding himself in the vanguard of the satire boom put paid to all that.
Jonathan Miller (far right) in Beyond the Fringe on Broadway, with (from left) Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Peter Cook © Friedman-Abeles, New York
But he stored all he’d learnt in that planet-sized brain. When he directed a celebrated production of La Bohème for ENO in 2009 (much revived, most recently in 2018), he explained in a TV programme the far from pretty medical facts behind death from consumption (TB): how Mimi would not have faded away attractively on a song, but coughing up blood she would have been unable to sing or stand up. “I never let her get out of bed. If you’ve spent your time watching the minute details of behaviour of people who are ill, you bring the observations of a doctor,” he declared.
His extraordinary vision of The Mikado (again for ENO and revived this year) makes for another unforgettable opera production. A tribute to British Empire eccentricity, it’s set in a 1930s Grand Hotel where the monochrome costumes include the three little maids in period school uniform.
As for Shakespeare, I was just a girl when I saw his Victorian-set Merchant of Venice, but I’ll never forget Laurence Olivier’s formidable Shylock, an assimilated frock-coated, top-hatted banker, turning to his tallit (prayer shawl) in his distress at his daughter’s betrayal. Nor will I forget the use of the Kaddish (the prayer for the dead) at the play’s ending.
Jonathan Miller appearing on After Dark, 3 September 1988
In 2015 I had the enormous good fortune to interview Sir Miller at his Camden home. He was returning to King Lear for the fifth time to direct Barrie Rutter in the title role for Northern Broadsides. He shared his thoughts on the play and more, ending with an impromptu masterclass on how to speak Shakespeare "eliminating verse" (hear him in full glorious flow talking to Judi on Theatre Voice).
Those forensic reality checks are all there, including the eye opener that lone male parents in Shakespeare might be down to the deaths of their wives during childbirth (so here Cordelia, the youngest is perhaps best loved just because she was the last child Lear’s queen could give him).
Nuggets include mischievous thoughts on the history of religion inspired by Lear’s famous line “Nothing will come of nothing”. Contextualising this apparently 1,000-year-old phrase he said wistfully: “I always wanted to do a pastiche with a voice from the darkness thundering, ‘Let there be light’ and then another (American) voice answering ‘No problem!’"
Perhaps he’s already making the Almighty laugh with that one.
By Judi Herman