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Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller, CBE (b. July 21, 1934) is a British physician, theatre and opera director and television presenter. He lives in Camden, North London.
History
Early life
Miller grew up in Hampstead 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; his sister Sarah (d. 2006) worked in television for many years and retained an involvement with Judaism that her brother, a self-declared atheist (see below) eschewed.
He studied natural sciences and medicine at St John's College at the University of Cambridge and University College London, graduating in 1959 and worked as a hospital doctor for the next two years.
The Fringe and beyond
He was, however, also involved in the university drama society and the Cambridge Footlights and in 1960 he helped write and produce 'Beyond the Fringe' at the Edinburgh Festival which launched the careers of Alan Bennett, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Miller quit the show shortly after its move to New York and took over as editor and presenter of the BBC's flagship arts programme Monitor. In 1966 he wrote, produced and directed a play of Alice in Wonderland for the BBC, and in 1968 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".
During the later 1960s, he had a major falling-out with the magazine Private Eye that he attributes to implicit anti-semitism.
Career 1970-2000
In the 1970s, he started directing and producing operas for the Kent Opera and Glyndebourne, with a new production of The Marriage of Figaro for English National Opera in 1978. He has now become one of the world's leading opera directors. At the same time he held a research fellowship in the history of medicine at University College, London. For a time he was a vice president of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality.http://www.gaymonitor.co.uk/chehistory2.htm
Most of his work for television has been for the BBC, starting by producing a series of 12 Shakespeare plays between 1980-1982. He also wrote and presented several factual series drawing on his experience as a physician, for example The Body in Question (1978) (which caused some controversy for showing the dissection of a cadaver), States of Mind 1983, Who Cares and Born Talking.
2000-present
In 2004, he wrote and presented a series on atheism, Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief (on-screen title; but more commonly referred to as Jonathan Miller's Brief History of Disbelief) for BBC Four TV, 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 individually aired in a six-part series entitled The Atheism Tapes.
Honours
He is also an honorary associate of the National Secular Society, and was appointed president of the Rationalist Association in 2006. http://www.newhumanist.org.uk/weblog.php?id=P2119
He is a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (1983), a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in London and Edinburgh, and a Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was knighted in 2002.
Parodies and representations
Miller has been the subject of several parodies:
- Jeremy Hilary Boob, Ph.D., a strange character in the Beatles animated movie Yellow Submarine, is widely believed to be based on Miller. Boob describes himself as an "eminent physicist, polyglot classicist, prize-winning botanist, hard-biting satirist, talented pianist, good dentist too", and the band sing the song Nowhere Man about him.
- 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 Jonathan Miller and Bernard Levin talk bollocks
- 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.
Bibliography
Country of publication is the UK, unless stated otherwise
As writer, contributor or editor
- (republished in 2000 as Introducing Darwin and Evolution Icon Books (Faber))
- (1994 Jonathan Cape [pop-up book])
- — participants include Jerome Bruner, Daniel Dennett, Brian Farrell, Jerry Fodor, Thomas Szasz
- (pop-up book intended for children)
- (The Applause Acting Series)
- (University Research Lecture Series No. 5)
- — Contributors Jonathan Miller with Stephen Jay Gould, Daniel J Kevles, RC Lewontin, Oliver Sacks
- [kit / model book]
- [collection of his photographs]
- — Essays by Jonathan Miller Geoffrey O'Brien, Charles Rosen, Tom Stoppard and Garry Wills
- Jonathan Miller appears on the Puccini and Bach DVDs of this BBC series.
- Jonathan Miller appears in this one-hour program on the painter
- Jonathan Miller has a director's commentary track.
Introduction or foreword contributed
- (directors note)
- (introduction)
Books about Miller
Miller and the satire boom
References
See also
- National Secular Society
- Rationalist Association
External links
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify the biographical information on this page under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.
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