Miller with John Cleese on the set of Taming of the Shrew
He went on to work for the BBC, editing and presenting arts show Monitor, as well as directing and producing The Body in Question and six of the BBC’s Television Shakespeare Collection. This included the 1980 adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, starring John Cleese as Petruchio, and the 1981 version of Othello, featuring Anthony Hopkins.
Knighted for his contribution to the arts by the Queen in 2002, Miller also directed operas, served as the artistic director of London’s Old Vic and worked as a director at the National Theatre, where he became an associate director under Laurence Olivier.
In her 2013 biography In Two Minds: A Biography of Jonathan Miller, Kate Bassett wrote, “One pre- school friend, Elishiva Landman, affectionately remembers him, at playgroup, as all red hair and freckles with a loud voice. Plainly, he wanted to make himself heard in spite of his impediment, unless he was having to up the volume just to articulate. Landman believes he stutters because he thought faster than he could talk, although Miller himself remarks that speaking rapidly helps his woosh through or ski-jump over obstructions.”
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Miller’s own words on his struggles with stammering are most compelling. In a 1977 interview on the BBC, he said, “It always got troublesome when I was on trains or buses, having to ask for my fare; and then there were all those circumlocutions that I had to go through. The awful thing about stammering is that you never know which consonants are going to be fatal ones. You think that you’ve got it all taped – avoid ‘T’s and ‘D’s today and it’ll be alright. Then, suddenly, you find that you’d be tripping up over an N.”
“There are people whose lives are really distorted and paralyzed by it and I’ve been very lucky in that I’ve been able to get around it.”
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