Juliet Miller was born on 5th December 1946 and died at Meadow House Hospice in Ealing on 24th September 2025, aged 78. A Londoner by birth and inclination, she grew up with her parents Katherine and Wright Miller, her brother Jonathan and her sister Susanna in St Peter’s Square in Hammersmith. She spent almost all her life in Hammersmith and Chiswick, apart from her 3 years at the University of Kent, where she read English and French, and her many trips abroad for work or on holiday.
After leaving Kent in 1968, Juliet trained to be a teacher, perhaps surprisingly considering how unhelpful she considered her own schooling to have been. But she quickly decided that teaching was not the career for her. She entered the BBC as an Assistant Film Editor and spent more than a decade working at the Beeb, especially in the Children’s and Schools department. In 1982 she left the BBC to become a freelance television producer, mostly at Thames Television and Channel Four, where she made a series of documentary programmes, especially on women and environmental issues. There was also a notable series on the history of the Nobel Prizes. These ventures took her to various parts of the world – to India, Bolivia, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and New Jersey. She also worked for a while in Mexico, Cyprus and Qatar. These were the creative years of her television career that she valued most.
But, partly from growing disenchantment with the way television was going and partly from her curiosity of mind and restless spirit, in the late 1980s she began to map out a new career for herself as a psychotherapist. Following a course in Psychological Counselling at Roehampton Institute in 1992, she trained at the Westminster Pastoral Foundation and at the Association of Jungian Analysts, before joining the Independent Group of Analytical Psychologists. This was a new career, but it was always more than a career – it was a way of caring about others and of better understanding herself. The vulnerability she saw in herself enabled her to see and understand the vulnerabilities in others. For more than 20 years she ran a successful practice as a psychotherapist from her home in Chiswick and she later advised and made assessments for would-be patients on where and with whom they might find the most appropriate therapeutic support. It was with great sadness and real regret that increasing illness forced her to give up this work, which she so much enjoyed and which she felt was of real value to others.
Juliet also found time to complete an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2010, where she won the Lorna Sage Memorial Prize for her work on the landscape sculptor Richard Long.
In the later stages of her life, Juliet found increasing personal satisfaction and creative self-expression in her writing, especially with respect to art and biography. After co-editing a collection of essays with Jane Haynes, Inconceivable Conceptions in 2003, she published The Creative Feminine and Her Discontents in 2008, On the Track of Richard Long in 2014, and Art, Memoir and Jung in 2020. During the long illness before she died, she was working on a book about her experience of cancer and her medical treatment, but in the end found it too upsetting to continue.
Juliet was married twice: to Robin Bates, a television producer, in 1973, and then in 1988, after her first marriage was dissolved, to David Arnold, an academic historian.