Jonathan Miller

Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller CBE (21 July 1934 – 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. Appointed by Laurence Olivier, Miller served as an associate director at the 11-year-old National Theatre from 1973 to 1975, right after the company's move to its current home. He would later (1988 to 1990) run its previous home, the Old Vic Theatre. Miller began directing operas in the 1970s; his 1982 English National Opera production of a mafioso Rigoletto was set in 1950s Little Italy, Manhattan. As a writer and presenter of more than a dozen BBC documentaries, Miller grew to become a television personality and public intellectual in Britain and the United States.