page_title: Martin Miller (actor)
section_title: Stage career
hierarchical_section_title: Martin Miller (actor) / Stage career
caption_attribution_description: English: The New Ambassadors Theatre, London, England.
context_page_description: Martin Miller, born Johann Rudolph Müller was a Czech-Austrian character actor who played many small roles in British films and television series from the early 1940s until his death. He was best known for playing eccentric doctors, scientists and professors, although he played a wide range of small, obscure roles—including photographers, waiters, a pet store dealer, rabbis, a Dutch sailor and a Swiss tailor. On stage he was noted in particular for his parodies of Adolf Hitler and roles as Dr. Einstein in Arsenic and Old Lace and Mr. Paravicini in The Mousetrap.
  Miller appeared in several notable films, including Squadron Leader X, English Without Tears, The Third Man, The Gamma People, Peeping Tom, 55 Days at Peking, The V.I.P.s, The Pink Panther, and The Yellow Rolls-Royce. His most substantial roles include George II of Great Britain in Bonnie Prince Charlie and Kublai Khan in the Doctor Who serial Marco Polo. In the 1960s, he appeared in several ITC Entertainment cult television programmes, including Ghost Squad, Danger Man, The Saint, The Avengers and The Prisoner.
context_section_description: In 1939, Miller was a co-founder of the Viennese Theatre Club of Paddington, a "celebrated émigré cabaret and theatre", also known as Das Laterndl. The theatrical group of talented Austrian exiles, which included the likes of Lona Cross, Fritz Schrecker and Marianne Walla became known for their sketches and plays which represented a "satirical commentary on Vienna under Nazi rule". Miller achieved fame for his parodies of Adolf Hitler, and he was asked to portray Hitler in the BBC German Service's propaganda campaign. He continued to be employed by the BBC after the war as a German-language author, actor, presenter and producer for the rest of his life. He also did much work arranging plays for the German and Austrian diaspora; for instance he arranged the production of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Iphigenia in Tauris in German at Wyndham's Theatre in October 1949 in coordination with the British Goethe Festival Society.
  On stage Miller was noted in particular for his roles as Dr. Einstein in Arsenic and Old Lace between 1942 and 1946 and Mr. Paravinci in Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap at the Ambassadors Theatre from 1952, a role in which he was described as an "elderly foreigner" with a "painted face which he makes half devil, half jack-in-the-box".  He worked mainly in London and New York City, and played Paravinci for over 1000 performances.
  In 1951, Miller appeared alongside Lily Hann, Alan Tilvern, Gabriel Woolf and Alfie Bass in a production of Emanuel Litvinoff's Magnolia Street Story at the Embassy Theatre. At the end of 1959 he appeared in the successful musical Make Me an Offer at the Theatre Workshop in Stratford and the New Theatre on the West End, taking "his place as the least scrupulous and the most amusing of the dealers with a somewhat lighter but entirely acceptable rendering".
caption: The Ambassadors Theatre where Miller portrayed Mr. Paravinci in The Mousetrap
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