Dr George Miller AO

Readers note: This is an excerpt from the 200 Treasures exhibition catalogue, developed in 2017. This content was written as a brief biography on why this person was included in the exhibition.

George Miller, director, screenwriter, producer, is considered the ‘statesman of Australian cinema’.

With a career beginning in the 1970s, Miller has been responsible for story-lines that range from sweet family fables to wild post-apocalyptic action sagas.

Many of Miller’s films have become classics admired throughout the world – the four Mad Max films (1979, 1981, 1985, 2015), The Witches of Eastwick (1987), Lorenzo’s Oil (1992), Babe (1995) and Happy Feet (2006) among them.

In the 1980s, his company, Kennedy Miller Mitchell, also produced groundbreaking miniseries, including The Dismissal (1983) and Bodyline (1984). Miller’s path to filmmaking was an unusual one. He grew up in the small rural town of Chinchilla, Queensland. ‘My childhood was an inadvertent apprenticeship for movie-making – it was spent entirely in play fuelled by the ritual Saturday matinee. For me the local cinema was a secular cathedral.’

Miller moved to Sydney as a teenager and went on to study medicine at the University of New South Wales with his twin brother John. Just as he graduated, he made a short film that won a contest. The prize was attendance at a film workshop, where he met Byron Kennedy. Their aspirations coincided with the renaissance of Australian cinema in the 1970s. Their contribution to this rebirth was the low-budget, genre-defining Mad Max.

Three decades later, Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road won six Academy Awards in 2016, a record for that year. Miller’s many accolades include an Academy Award for his animation Happy Feet, a BAFTA and 11 AFI awards.

He was the first Patron of the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) Awards. He served as President of the Jury at the 69th Cannes Film Festival and was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1996.