My friend Tim Miller, who has died aged 87, was one of the behind-the-scenes architects of 20th-century London cultural life. In the 1960s he worked with Peter Cook at the start of Private Eye, the satirical magazine, and supported the foundation of Centrepoint, Britain’s largest homelessness charity. Film was his main calling, but he shied away from the red carpet. Instead he used his incisive intelligence and deep understanding of the world to guide other people – friends, students, artists, priests and ex-cons – towards their creative potential.
Born into an aristocratic family near Woodbridge, Suffolk, Tim was the younger son of Maj William Pitt Miller and his wife, Juliet (nee St Aubyn). Later he dropped the double-barrelled surname. After a stint in the Grenadier Guards, where he felt like a misfit, Tim settled in London. He was a founding shareholder of Private Eye Productions in 1963 and helped manage Cook’s rowdy Establishment Club, a magnet for the counterculture.
In the early days of the swinging 60s, he forged a path in documentary film-making, working alongside John Irvin at Mithras Films. Their gritty style started a trend for socially conscious films with the camera at the centre of the action.
In the early 1970s, after working as location manager on films such as Hannibal Brooks, starring Oliver Reed, and The Lawman, with Burt Lancaster, Tim experienced a Damascene conversion that led him to leave the film industry and become a probation officer in Notting Hill. Over 15 years, he worked with prisoners and ex-cons, becoming a devoted mentor to many.
His service extended beyond work. As warden at St Anne’s Church, in his beloved Soho, in 1969, he helped the Rev Ken Leech set up Centrepoint in the basement of St Anne’s House, and worked the night shift to provide beds and soup to homeless youths. Tim also helped restore the grave of the essayist William Hazlitt in St Anne’s graveyard.
He returned to cinema in 1989 to lead the postgraduate film programme at the Royal College of Art. His collaboration with the director Asif Kapadia, a former student, resulted in the screenplay for the double Bafta-winning The Warrior (2001). He delighted in introducing his students to friends such as the film-maker Derek Jarman.
Tim maintained a deep connection to his Suffolk roots, especially to the Shingle Street cottage he loved. There, a shell line created by friends commemorated their cancer survival. Tim would say that East Anglia’s gift to the world was its light. He erected two standing stones facing east towards the rising sun that are engraved with the words of William Blake, one of many poets whose works Tim liked to recite from memory with thundering intensity. They sum up his spiritual quest: “And we are put on earth a little space, That we may learn to bear the beams of love.”
