Jonathan Miller
Jonathan Miller received Laurence Olivier Awards across a career that spanned medicine, theatre, opera, television, and film, representing one of the more unusual combinations of professional life in twentieth-century British culture.
Miller was born in London on 21 July 1934 and received his early education at Arnold House School before going on to St John's College, Cambridge. He subsequently studied at University College London and the University of Birmingham, and his medical training led him to qualify as a physician and, more specifically, as a neurologist. He was later appointed a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, as well as a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London. This sustained engagement with science and medicine ran alongside, rather than in opposition to, his parallel work in the arts.
As an actor, playwright, writer, and theatre director, Miller worked extensively in English-language productions. He also directed opera and film, and worked as a television presenter and producer. The breadth of those roles meant that his output moved between very different institutional contexts, from stage and opera house to broadcast studio. His honours reflected that range: he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire and was later created a Knight Bachelor. He also received an honorary doctorate and the Albert Medal, in addition to the Laurence Olivier Awards noted above.
Miller died in London on 27 November 2019. Among the formal recognitions that marked the later part of his life, his fellowship of two separate royal colleges of physicians stands as a reminder that his medical identity remained active and credentialled even as his directorial work accumulated its own distinctions. The combination of a Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and a Knight Bachelor in a single career points to the institutional range that defined his public life up to his death.
Quotes by Jonathan Miller

I became startled by the extraordinary difference between something whose surface is completely invisible which only makes itself present by virtue of what it reflects, and a window, which doesn't make itself apparent at all, in the ideal case.

He's trying to use the strategy of Greenspan-speak - to temper homebuyers' euphoria,

Being a doctor has taught me a lot about directing. You're doing the same thing: You're reconstructing the manifold of behavior to the point where an audience says, yes, that's exactly like people I know.

I'm not against asking the audience to work, but I think what you have now is a sort of gratuitous deconstruction as a result of a fashion of literary deconstructionism indicating that there are no meanings.





