"I was trained as a neurologist, and then I went into the theater, and if you're brought up to think of yourself as a biological scientist of some sort, pretty well everything else seems frivolous by comparison." -- Jonathan Miller
Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller CBE (born 21 July 1934) is a British theatre and opera director, author, television presenter, humorist and sculptor. Trained as a physician in the late 1950s, he first came to prominence in the 1960s with his role in the BBC comedy sketch show Beyond the Fringe with fellow writers and performers Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett. Despite having seen few operas and not knowing how to read music, he began stage-directing them in the 1970s and has since become one of the world's leading opera directors with several classic productions to his credit. His best-known production is probably his 1982 "Mafia"-styled Rigoletto set in 1950s Little Italy, Manhattan. He has also become a well-known television personality and familiar public intellectual in the UK and US.
"A lot of high-level scientists are in fact people of almost universal interest.""Argumentative exhibitions bring issues to life in a way that very much irritates traditional curators who want to see their pictures valued for themselves.""As we know from the work of certain fundamental physicists, people like Einstein were very dependent upon conjuring up visual images in order to imagine things which otherwise were not easily formulated.""Being a doctor has taught me a lot about directing. You're doing the same thing: You're reconstructing the manifold of behavior to the point where an audience says, yes, that's exactly like people I know.""Errors of taste are very often the outward sign of a deep fault of sensibility.""I became startled by the extraordinary difference between something whose surface is completely invisible which only makes itself present by virtue of what it reflects, and a window, which doesn't make itself apparent at all, in the ideal case.""I spend a lot of my time trying to draw the attention of actors to the minute and subtle details of human behavior, which was the sort of thing I was looking at when I was a neurologist.""I wasn't driven into medicine by a social conscience but by rampant curiosity.""I'm not against asking the audience to work, but I think what you have now is a sort of gratuitous deconstruction as a result of a fashion of literary deconstructionism indicating that there are no meanings.""I'm not really a Jew; just Jew-ish, not the whole hog.""It's not that Shakespeare is frivolous, but you spend your time just getting people to dress up in other people's costumes and pretending to be people that they're not, and you think, after the years go by, well, what on earth was all that about?""Now, that is in a way also what scientists are trying to do they're trying to get people to see that the world can be represented in an alternative way and that it's right.""People are already self-selected by the time they've decided to become scientists.""People can't draw now and don't feel it's necessary. Art students don't seem to want to draw.""Science is a self-sufficient activity.""Someone like Einstein was quite clearly a moralist, and he had a very highly developed political vision and was very spiritual in his way, and there are many biologists and physicists of the first order who are like that.""The burden of the past is only, I think, oppressive when you've got to go on the experience of the avant garde.""The thing about science is that it's an accurate picture of the world.""What I should have been, you see, is a neurologist.""What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.""What people want is not what some would call imaginative and often austere productions but very lavish productions which cast back into the auditorium an image of their affluence.""You spend ten years of your life being trained to do one thing, and you're being taught to think that it's the most serious thing that anyone could possibly do, and then suddenly you find yourself doing something that in some respects is the epitome of frivolity."
Miller grew up in St John's Wood, London in a well-connected Jewish family. His father Emanuel (1892—1970) was a psychiatrist specialising in child development and his mother Betty (née Spiro; 1910—1965) was a novelist and biographer. Miller's sister Sarah (died 2006) worked in television for many years and retained an involvement with Judaism that he, an atheist, has always eschewed.
Miller married Helen Rachel Collet in 1956. They have two sons and a daughter.
Miller studied natural sciences and medicine at St John's College, Cambridge (MB BCh, 1959), where he was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, before going on to University College London. He qualified as a medical doctor in 1959 and then worked as a hospital house officer for two years.
1960s: Beyond the Fringe
While studying medicine, Miller was involved in the Cambridge Footlights. In 1960, he helped to write and produce a musical revue, Beyond the Fringe, at the Edinburgh Festival. 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 to Broadway in 1962 and took over as editor and presenter of the BBC's flagship arts programme Monitor in 1965. All these appointments were unsolicited invitations, the Monitor appointment arose because Miller had approached Huw Wheldon about taking up a place on the BBC's director training course, in which Miller was assured that he would "pick it up as he went along". In 1966, he wrote, produced and directed a film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland for the BBC, followed in 1968 by Whistle and I'll Come to You, an adaptation of M. R. James' ghost story "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad". By 1970, his reputation in British theatre was such that he mounted a West End production of The Merchant of Venice starring Laurence Olivier.
1970s: Medical history and opera
Miller held a research fellowship in the history of medicine at University College, London from 1970 to 1973. In 1974, he also started directing and producing operas for Kent Opera and Glyndebourne, followed by a new production of The Marriage of Figaro for English National Opera in 1978. Despite only having seen a few operas and not knowing how to read music, Miller has become one of the world's leading opera directors with classic productions being Rigoletto and the operetta The Mikado.
Miller drew upon his own experiences as a physician as writer and presenter of the BBC television series The Body in Question (1978), which caused some controversy for showing the dissection of a cadaver. For a time, he was a vice president of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality.
1980s: Shakespeare and neuropsychology
Miller was persuaded to join the troubled BBC Television Shakespeare project (1978—85) in 1980. He became producer (1980—82) and directed six of the plays himself, beginning with a well received Taming of the Shrew starring John Cleese. In the early 1980s, Miller was a popular and frequent guest on PBS' Dick Cavett Show.
Miller wrote and presented the BBC television series States of Mind in 1983. In 1984, he studied neuropsychology with Dr. Sandra Witelson at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada before becoming a neuropsychology research fellow at Sussex University the following year.
1990s
In the 1990s, Miller wrote and presented the television series Madness (1991) and Jonathan Miller on Reflection (1998). The five-part Madness series ran on PBS in 1991. It featured a brief history of madness and interviews with psychiatric researchers, clinical psychiatrists, and patients in therapy sessions.
2000s: Atheism and return to directing
In 2004, Miller wrote and presented a TV series on atheism entitled A Rough History of Disbelief (more commonly referred to as Jonathan Miller's Brief History of Disbelief) for BBC Four, exploring the roots of his own atheism and investigating the history of atheism in the world. Individual conversations, debates and discussions for the series that could not be included due to time constraints were aired in a six-part series entitled The Atheism Tapes. He also appeared on a BBC Two programme in February 2004, called What the World Thinks of God appearing from New York. The original three-part series was slated to air on Public Television in the United States, starting May 4, 2007, cosponsored by the American Ethical Union, American Humanist Association, Centre for Inquiry, the HKH Foundation, and the Institute for Humanist Studies.
In 2007, Miller directed The Cherry Orchard at The Crucible, Sheffield, his first work on the British stage for ten years. He also directed Monteverdi's L'Orfeo in Manchester and Bristol, and Der Rosenkavalier in Tokyo and gave talks throughout Britain during 2007 called An Audience with Jonathan Miller in which he spoke about his life for an hour and then fielded questions from the audience. He also curated an exhibition on camouflage at the Imperial War Museum. He has appeared at the Royal Society of the Arts in London discussing humour (4 July 2007) and at the British Library on religion (3 September 2007).
In January 2009, after a break of twelve years, Miller returned to the English National Opera to direct his own production of La Bohème, notable for its 1930s setting. This same production will run at the Cincinnati Opera in July 2010, also directed by Miller.
Miller lives in Camden, North London.
On 15 September 2010, Miller, along with 54 other public figures, signed an open letter published in The Guardian, stating their opposition to Pope Benedict XVI's state visit to the UK.
Private Eye (which had a falling-out with Miller) occasionally lampooned him under the name 'Dr Jonathan', depicting him as a Dr Johnson-like self-important man of learning.
The satirical television puppet show Spitting Image portrayed Miller as an anteater (lampooning his large nose), as well as featuring a segment entitled "Talking Bollocks" (the 'A' in 'Talking' combining with the 'ollo' in "Bollocks" below to create a penis), in which he discussed, with Bernard Levin, various cultural matters in a ridiculously pretentious way.
In the film for television Not Only But Always about the careers of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Jonathan Aris played Jonathan Miller as a young man; Aris reprised the role in the BBC Radio 4 play Good Evening (2008) by Roy Smiles.
Along with the other members of Beyond the Fringe, he is portrayed in the play Come Again, by Chris Bartlett and Nick Awde.
Alice in Wonderland (1966; BBC television drama; Also writer and producer; Provides commentary track on DVD version)
Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968; BBC television drama).
BBC Television Shakespeare (1978—85):
The Taming of the Shrew (1980), starring John Cleese.
Timon of Athens (1981), starring Jonathan Pryce.
Antony and Cleopatra (1981), starring Colin Blakely.
Othello (1981), starring Anthony Hopkins and Bob Hoskins.
Troilus and Cressida (1981) .
King Lear (1982), starring Michael Hordern.
Interviewer
The Atheism Tapes (2004).
Interviewee
Miller appears on the Puccini and Bach DVDs of this BBC series. In the Bach episode, he discusses his affection for the famous "Erbarme Dich" aria of the St Matthew Passion.
Miller appears in this one-hour program on the painter.
Beyond the Fringe (performer, writer, producer; Edinburgh Festival, 1960).
Beyond the Fringe (performer, writer; John Golden Theatre, 27 October 1962 to 30 May 1964; 667 performances).
Oratorium
St. Matthew's Passion (Director; St. George's Theatre, London, February 1994) with Paul Goodwin. A dramatized production of J.S. Bach's masterpiece, recorded for BBC Television.
Drama
The Merchant of Venice (Director; Cambridge Theatre, 1970) starring Laurence Olivier.
Danton's Death (Director; 1972) starring Christopher Plummer.
Long Day's Journey Into Night (Director; Broadhurst Theatre, 28 April to 29 June 1986; 54 performances).
King Lear (Director; Vivian Beaumont Theatre 4 March to 18 April 2004; 33 performances).
The Cherry Orchard (Director; Crucible Theatre, 2007). Miller's return to the English stage after a ten-year absence.
Opera
Così fan tutte (Stage director; Kent Opera, 1974). The first of seven operas Miller directed for Kent Opera.
Rigoletto (Stage director; 1975). Set in the 19th century.
Le nozze di Figaro (Stage director; English National Opera, 1978). A televised version was made in 1991.
Rigoletto (Stage and video director; English National Opera, 1982). Set in 1950s Little Italy, Manhattan.
La traviata (Stage director; Glimmerglass Opera, 1989).
La fanciulla del West (Stage and video director; 1991).
The Mikado (Stage and video director; English National Opera, 1987) starring Eric Idle.
Le nozze di Figaro (Stage director and producer; Metropolitan Opera, 1998)
Die Zauberflöte (Stage and video director; 2000).
Tamerlano (Stage and video director; 2001).
Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Stage and video director; 2003).
Falstaff (Stage director; New National Theatre Tokyo, 2004).
Jen?fa (Stage director; Glimmerglass Opera with New York City Opera in Cooperstown, New York, 29 July to 29 August 2006).
L'Orfeo (Stage director; Manchester and Bristol productions, 200?).
Der Rosenkavalier (Stage director; New National Theatre Tokyo, 2007).
La traviata (Stage director; Glimmerglass Opera, 2009).
La bohème (Stage director; Cincinnati Opera, 2010).
Miller is the subject of a forthcoming biography, In Two Minds by The Independent on Sunday's theatre critic Kate Bassett, due to be published in November 2010. The title refers to Miller's career which has embraced both medicine and the arts, and to his riven feelings and deep regrets about having given up working as a doctor to become an internationally renowned drama and opera director.
