Jonathan Miller

Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller CBE (21 July 1934 – 27 November 2019) was an English theatre and opera director, actor, author, television presenter, humourist and physician. After training in medicine and specialising in neurology in the late 1950s, he came to prominence in the early 1960s in the comedy revue '' Beyond the Fringe'' with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett.

Miller began directing operas in the 1970s. His 1982 production of a "Mafia"-styled ''Rigoletto'' was set in 1950s Little Italy, Manhattan. In its early days, he was an associate director at the National Theatre. He later ran the Old Vic Theatre. As a writer and presenter of more than a dozen BBC documentaries, Miller became a television personality and public intellectual in Britain and the United States.

Life and career

Early life

Miller grew up in St John's Wood, London, in a well-connected Jewish family. His father Emanuel (1892–1970), who was of Lithuanian descent and suffered from severe rheumatoid arthritis, was a military psychiatrist and subsequently a paediatric psychiatrist at Harley House. His mother, Betty Miller (née Spiro) (1910–1965), was a novelist and biographer who was originally from County Cork, Ireland. Miller had an elder sister, Sarah (died 2006) who worked in television for many years and retained an involvement with Judaism that Miller, as an atheist, always eschewed. The young Miller was brought for assessment to several child psychiatrists, including Donald Winnicott. As a teenager he had many sessions with the psychiatrist Leopold Stein, whose sessions he enjoyed and in which they "simply conversed about philosophy and Hughlings Jackson's early neurological theories."

Miller moved between several different schools prior to attending Taunton School, including for a time at the Rudolf Steiner School Kings Langley (a Waldorf school) where he was taught by two of Ivy Compton-Burnett's sisters and says of that time that he "never learnt anything at all". Miller concluded his secondary school education at St Paul's School, London where he developed an early (and ultimately lifelong) interest in the biological sciences. While at St Paul's School at the age of 12, Miller met and became close friends with Oliver Sacks and Sacks's best friend Eric Korn, friendships which remained crucial throughout the rest of their lives. In 1953, before leaving secondary school, he performed comedy several times on the BBC radio programme ''Under Twenty Parade''. Miller studied natural sciences and medicine at St John's College, Cambridge (MB BChir, 1959), where he was a member of the Cambridge Apostles before going on to train at University College Hospital in London.

While studying medicine, Miller was involved in the Cambridge Footlights, appearing in the revues ''Out of the Blue'' (1954) and ''Between the Lines'' (1955). Good reviews for these shows, and for Miller's performances in particular, led to his performing on a number of radio and television shows while continuing his studies; these included appearances on ''Saturday Night on the Light'', ''Tonight'' and ''Sunday Night at the London Palladium''. He qualified as a physician in 1959 and then worked as a hospital house officer for two years, including at the Central Middlesex Hospital as house physician for gastroenterologist Francis Avery Jones.

1960s: ''Beyond the Fringe''

Miller helped to write and produce the satirical revue '' Beyond the Fringe'', which premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in August 1960. This launched, in addition to his own, the careers of Alan Bennett, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Miller quit the show shortly after its move from London to Broadway in 1962, and took over as editor and presenter of the BBC
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