The Doctor Who Took a Detour
Jonathan Miller was born in London in 1934 and trained as a doctor, studying medicine at Cambridge and qualifying in 1959. Medicine never entirely released him. He later held a research fellowship in the history of medicine at University College London, and the television series that reached his largest audience was a study of the human body. But it was the Cambridge Footlights rather than the wards that made his name.
In August 1960 the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe opened at the Edinburgh Festival, written and performed by Miller alongside Alan Bennett, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. It transferred to the West End and then to Broadway, where the four received a special Tony Award in 1963. Miller was disarmingly practical about his motives, saying afterwards that he had taken part largely in order to earn enough money to buy a house near Regent's Park.
More Than Fifty Years in Gloucester Crescent
He duly bought one. In 1961 Miller and his wife Rachel, a general practitioner, moved into Gloucester Crescent, the long Italianate sweep of stuccoed houses completed in the 1840s to designs by the architect Henry Bassett, in the streets that run between Camden Town and Primrose Hill. He stayed there for the rest of his life.
The Crescent filled up around him with writers, broadcasters and musicians, and the press eventually took to describing it as Britain's cleverest street. Alan Bennett lived on it for some forty years; the biographer Claire Tomalin arrived in the 1960s; the jazz singer George Melly, the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis and the philosopher A. J. Ayer were all neighbours at one point or another. Miller and his wife are credited locally with helping Bennett find his house on the street, the house that later produced The Lady in the Van.
Monitor, The Body in Question and the BBC Shakespeares
Miller edited and presented the BBC arts programme Monitor in the mid-1960s, one of several roles that made him a familiar broadcasting figure without ever quite settling him into a single profession.
In 1978 came The Body in Question, a thirteen-part series in which he used his medical training to explain human anatomy to a general audience. Between 1980 and 1982 he produced the BBC Television Shakespeare and directed six of the plays himself, among them a well-received Taming of the Shrew with John Cleese as Petruchio.
Rigoletto in Little Italy
He began directing opera in 1974, and it became the work he was most consistently associated with in later life. His best-known production, staged for English National Opera in 1982, moved Rigoletto out of Renaissance Mantua and into the Little Italy of 1950s Manhattan, replacing the ducal court with a mafia hierarchy. He was appointed CBE in 1983 and knighted in 2002. Throughout all of it he painted and made sculpture and collage.
Doorstep Tutorials
What neighbours remembered afterwards was less the CV than the conversation. The writer A. N. Wilson recalled that stopping Miller in the street could produce an impromptu tutorial on neuroscience or Wittgenstein. The illustrator David Gentleman, another long-standing Camden resident, said his range of interests was wider than that of anyone else he knew.
He took an interest in local matters as well, objecting publicly to Camden Council's plans for repaving Inverness Street market on the grounds that the proposed surface ignored the realities of English weather. He died on 27 November 2019, aged 85, having lived on the same street since the year Beyond the Fringe reached London.