Topic: Jonathan Miller

Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller, CBE (born 21 July 1934) is a British theatre and opera director, author, television presenter, humorist and sculptor. Trained as a physician in the late 1950s, he first came to prominence in 1962 when the British comedy stage revue Beyond the Fringe (written and performed by Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Miller himself) came to Broadway. Despite having seen only a few operas and not knowing how to read music, he began stage directing operas in the 1970s and has since become one of the world's leading opera directors with several classic productions to his credit. (Probably best known is his 1982 "Mafia" Rigoletto, set in Little Italy.) Along the way he has also become a well known and engaging television personality and familiar public intellectual in both the UK and the US.

Miller grew up in St John's Wood, London in a well-connected Jewish family. His father Emanuel (1892–1970) was a psychiatrist specialising in child development and his mother Betty (née Spiro; 1910–1965) was a novelist and biographer. His sister Sarah (d. 2006) worked in television for many years and retained an involvement with Judaism that her brother, an atheist, has always eschewed.

Miller married Helen Rachel Collet in 1956; they have two sons and a daughter.