- Born
- Died
- Birth nameJonathan Wolfe Miller
- Height6′ 4″ (1.93 m)
- Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller CBE (21 July 1934 to 27 November 2019) was an English theatre and opera director, actor, author, television presenter, comedian 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. He popularized anatomy in The Body in Question.
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.
- IMDb mini biography by: Wikipedia
- SpouseHelen Rachel Collet(July 27, 1956 - November 27, 2019) (his death, 3 children)
- RelativesDaisy Miller(Grandchild)
- In 1963, won a Special Tony Award, along with his "Beyond the Fringe" co-stars Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, and Dudley Moore, "for their brilliance which has shattered all the old concepts of comedy," in a show that was recreated in a television version of the same title, Beyond the Fringe (1964). In 1986, he also received a Tony nomination as Best Director (Play) for a revival of Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey into Night."
- Was one of the members of the original Beyond the Fringe comedy troupe (with Dudley Moore and Peter Cook, among others).
- He studied Medicine at Cambridge University in England, and presented many medical programmes on television, including The Body in Question (1978).
- As well as being a qualified doctor, he was a satirist, sculptor, photographer, author, television presenter, performer, and theatre, opera & film director.
- Once directed Cosi Fan Tutte with the cast entirely dressed by Armani.
- Some older singers get ossified. They say, "No, I mustn't stand there, Alfredo would not do that" and I always want to reply, "When exactly were you last in touch with Alfredo on this subject?" But if they are young, they will do anything - even act.
- I have a simple formula as a director. It's nothing more really than reminding singers of what they know already and have forgotten, a redirecting of their attention to Chekhovian detail--the little, negligible actions which are made considerable . . . So the funny thing is that once I start directing the drama, I don't have to tell them what to do, any more than I have to tell a child to raise its voice at the end of an interrogative sentence.
- There are all sorts of tiny movements we make when relating to another person. So when I say, "What about this little hand movement?" I only have to say it once. They reply, "Oh, of course! You don't tell us how to do anything: you remind us of what we know to do anyway".
- When you get to my age, there's a certain point at which you're assumed to be dead. Or if not dead, then almost certainly rotting.
- Unless you spend a great deal of time networking and going out and having dinners and making appointments and seeing people and schmoozing, you don't get jobs after a certain age. Next year I'll be 80, and they assume that if you're 80, the chances are that you're either in a care home, and that in any case you're probably dead from the neck up, so you don't get jobs. But if you keep your wits about you and you don't develop Alzheimer's, you're probably better the older you are because you've seen a longer stretch of human life. I think I'm probably as good if not better than I was when I was younger. But they ignore that entirely.
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