Published: 3 December 2019
Last updated: 5 March 2024
THE FIRST THING YOU’D SEE in Jonathan Miller was self-doubt. “I should have stuck to being a doctor,” he’d say, before hanging up your coat. Or: “The theatre’s pretty worthless, isn’t it?”
We both got banned from the Metropolitan Opera — he for disrespecting divas and I for other iconoclasms — and we recognised in each other the eternal outsider, as well as the introspection. The son of a psychiatrist, he wore neuroses on his sleeve and never lost his sense of wonder at the diversity of the human condition.
“I went into medicine out of cold-hearted curiosity about how the brain worked,” he’d reflect. “I suspect theatre is morally — no, intellectually — less worthy.”
His father, Emanuel Miller, was a pioneer in child psychiatry with a keen interest in social reform. His mother, Betty Miller, was a witty novelist, a friend of Olivia Manning. “My mother was bored with her Jewish origins,” he’d tell me, “my father was much more immersed in it.”
The house in St John’s Wood was a hub of ideas. “I get called Renaissance man or polymath,” Jonathan would sigh, “my father did these things because he was a civilized fellow.” Talking of his mother’s early decline with Alzheimer’s, undiagnosed by father or son, he confessed to an irresoluble guilt.
FULL STORY ‘Take it from me. Dying is a full-time business. No time for a lap of honour’ (Jewish Chronicle)
Photo: Sir Jonathan Miller, who has died at age 85 (BBC)
