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Theater & Opera Director
Physician Author
Profile
"A fully accredited physician and neuropsychologist, a prolific author and lecturer...” wrote The New York Times, “[Jonathan Miller] knows more than a little about everything. He combines qualities that shouldn’t be contained in one person: he is both a performer and a thinker.”
A legendary theater and opera director, Miller first gained international prominence with Beyond the Fringe, the 1960 play (written and performed with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett) that redefined the boundaries of comedy — launching a lunatic legacy that has stretched from Monty Python to Saturday Night Live.
 Jonathan Miller's residency at Vanderbilt University captured the imagination of hundreds of people in the community, and he transformed the lives of the students and faculty members he worked with in the theater, concert hall, and medical center. It was a defining moment for the |
| Vanderbilt University |
Since then, he has enjoyed one of the most stellar careers in modern theater. When audience members attend a performance directed by Miller — from Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion or Rigoletto to Eugene O’Neil’s Long Day’s Journey into Night — they witness something they’ve never seen before: Miller’s unique ability to “dislocate things slightly so that people look at a work anew.”
In his lectures, Miller is a dazzling intellectual mind at play. Whatever the subject at hand, from his theory of the “After-Life of Plays” to “Bedside Manners,” his humor, wit and charm shine through.
For colleges and universities interested in an extended visit, Dr. Miller will accept an occasional one or two-week residency. His multidisciplinary expertise (in drama, music, medicine, neuroscience, psychology, film, photography and the visual arts) has made these residencies very popular.
He has directed countless plays (including his critically-acclaimed 2002 production of Shakespeare’s King Lear) and over 50 operas at some of the world’s most distinguished venues, including the Metropolitan Opera and La Scala. In recent years, he has staged “revelatory” reproductions of The Mikado, Pelleas et Melisande and The Marriage of Figaro.
Miller has written and presented several major series for the BBC and PBS, including States of Mind and The Question of Language. He has produced and directed 11 plays for the BBC’s prestigious Shakespeare series, which aired in the U.S. In 2002 he was proclaimed Knight Bachelor in Queen Elizabeth II’s Jubilee Birthday Honours List.
His books include The Human Body, The Facts of Life, Nowhere in Particular, Subsequent Performances and The Body in Question, based on his landmark, 13-part TV series on the history of medicine.
Miller is available for a special four-part museum presentation, “From the Look of Things,” which he presented at the National Gallery in London and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Yale University Press published On Reflection, a book based on these lectures.