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Name: Jonathan Miller
Field:
Director
Productions:
An Audience With Jonathan Miller
An Audience with Ken Russell
An Audience With Barry Norman
Biography: Jonathan Miller 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.
He was 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".
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.
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.
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.
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