Jonathan Miller

Jonathan Miller

Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller CBE (born 21 July 1934) is a British theatre and opera director, actor, author, television presenter, humorist and sculptor. Trained as a physician in the late 1950s, he first came to prominence in the early 1960s with his role in the comedy revue 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. In its early days he was an associate director at the Royal National Theatre and later he ran the Old Vic Theatre. He has also become a well-known television personality and familiar public intellectual in Britain and the United States of America.