The director of Notting Hill walked away from a James Bond film
Roger Michell made Notting Hill, which became the biggest British box-office success ever, yet he quit Quantum of Solace after months of meetings produced no usable script. A diplomat's son who grew up in Beirut and Prague, he moved easily between the Royal Court stage, BBC drama and Hollywood comedy.
Michell was born in Pretoria in 1956, though not South African: his father was a British diplomat posted there, and the family later lived in Beirut, Damascus and Prague, where they witnessed the 1968 invasion. At Clifton College and then Queens' College, Cambridge, he directed dozens of plays and won a Fringe First in Edinburgh for Private Dick, a Raymond Chandler comedy that later reached the West End. In 1978 he became an assistant at the Royal Court, working alongside figures such as Samuel Beckett and John Osborne, with a young Danny Boyle as his stage manager.
Six years as a resident director at the Royal Shakespeare Company followed from 1985. A BBC course teaching stage directors how to use a camera opened the door to television, and his adaptation of Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia led to Persuasion in 1995, a Jane Austen film that won the BAFTA for best single drama. At the National Theatre he staged Pinter's The Homecoming and Blue/Orange, which ran a year in the West End. Richard Curtis then chose him to direct Notting Hill.
Kureishi became his most important writing partner, supplying The Mother, Venus with Peter O'Toole and Le Week-End with Jim Broadbent. When talks turned to directing Daniel Craig as Bond, Michell backed out, later saying the producers wanted a 2007 release without a finished story while a writers' strike loomed. The film was eventually delayed and made by Marc Forster. His later work ranged from Hyde Park on Hudson, with Bill Murray as Roosevelt, which earned him a Golden Globe nomination, to The Duke with Helen Mirren.
One of his most personal projects was The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies, about a retired teacher wrongly suspected of murder; Jefferies had taught Michell at school. His two marriages, to Kate Buffery and later Anna Maxwell Martin, produced four children. He died of a heart attack in Hitchin in September 2021, aged 65, and his last film, a documentary portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, appeared in 2022.
Source: Roger Michell
