Roger Harry Michell (5 June 1956 – 22 September 2021) was a British theatre, television and film director. He was best known for directing films such as Notting Hill and Venus, as well as the 1995 made-for-television film Persuasion.

Roger Harry Michell was born on 5 June 1956 in Pretoria, Union of South Africa. He was not South African, as is sometimes mistakenly assumed, but was born there because his father was a British diplomat who had been posted to South Africa. On account of his father's job, Michell spent parts of his childhood in Beirut, Damascus, and Prague; he and his family were in Prague during the 1968 invasion.

He was educated at Clifton College in Bristol, where he began directing and writing short plays, before studying English at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he directed and acted in dozens of plays, winning both the RSC Buzz Goodbody Award for Best Student Director at the NSDF, and a Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for his play Private Dick. He graduated in 1977.

After leaving Cambridge, Michell moved to Brighton where he directed Peter Gill’s Small Change and other plays for the Brighton Actors Workshop. In 1978, under the RTDS scheme, he became an assistant director at the Royal Court Theatre where he assisted, amongst others, John Osborne, Max Stafford-Clark, and Samuel Beckett, and directed a number of plays in the Theatre Upstairs. Michell's contemporaries at the Court included Antonia Bird, Simon Curtis, Hanif Kureishi and, as his stage manager, Danny Boyle.

In 1979 he left the Royal Court Theatre and began writing and directing as a freelance, the most successful result of which was Private Dick, a comedy about Raymond Chandler co-written with Richard Maher, which opened at the Lyric Hammersmith to great reviews, and later moved to the West End with Robert Powell as Philip Marlowe.

In 1985, Michell joined the Royal Shakespeare Company where, as Resident Director for six years, he directed plays by Shakespeare, Havel, Nelson, Bond, Farquhar, Darke, and others, including Richard Nelson's Some Americans Abroad, which transferred to Broadway in 1990. In 1989, Michell was appointed the Judith E Wilson Senior Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Michell was a graduate of the BBC Directors' Course, a three-month course especially designed to help theatre directors understand the camera. Subsequently, his first piece of television was the three-part Leigh Jackson thriller Downtown Lagos, produced by Michael Wearing, which in turn led to the award-winning adaptation of Hanif Kureishi's autobiographical novel The Buddha of Suburbia, starring Naveen Andrews, which he scripted with the novelist. He followed that with the BBC film of Jane Austen’s Persuasion in 1995, widely regarded as one of the finest Austen adaptations, and winner of the 1995 BAFTA for Best Single Drama. Michell then directed My Night with Reg (1997), from the award-winning play that he had directed at the Royal Court and for a year in the West End. Next came Titanic Town (1998), a story set in Northern Ireland in the 1970s starring Julie Walters and Ciaran Hinds, and winner of Awards at Emden and Locarno.

Throughout the 1990s, Michell directed a number of productions at the National Theatre including Mustapha Matura's The Coup, Pinter's The Homecoming, Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, Joanna Murray Smith's Honour, Joe Penhall's Landscape With Weapon, Granville Barker's Waste, Nina Raine's Consent (subsequently at the Harold Pinter Theatre in the West End), and Blue/Orange with Bill Nighy, Andrew Lincoln, and Chiwetel Ejiofor, which won numerous awards and played in the West End for a year. Michell was subsequently sought out by Richard Curtis to direct his script Notting Hill, which became an award-winning smash hit and the greatest British Box Office success of all time. He then directed the 2002 critical box office success Changing Lanes starring Ben Affleck and Samuel L. Jackson.