Arthur Miller
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005)[1][2] was an
American playwright and essayist. He was a prominent figure in American
theatre, writing dramas that include award-winning plays such as All My
Sons, Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible.
Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late
1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, a period during which he testified before
the House Un-American Activities Committee, received the Pulitzer Prize
for Drama, and was married to Marilyn Monroe.
Biography
Early life
Arthur Asher Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in New York City, the
second of three children of Isidore and Augusta Miller, Polish-Jewish
immigrants. His father, an illiterate but wealthy businessman, owned a
women's clothing store employing 400 people. The family, including his
younger sister Joan, lived on East 110th Street in Manhattan and owned a
summer house in Far Rockaway, Queens. They employed a chauffeur. In the
Wall Street Crash of 1929, the family lost almost everything and moved
to Gravesend, Brooklyn.[4] As a teenager, Miller delivered bread every
morning before school to help the family make ends meet. After
graduating in 1932 from Abraham Lincoln High School, he worked at
several menial jobs to pay for his college tuition.
At the University of Michigan, Miller first majored in journalism and
worked as a reporter and night editor for the student paper, the
Michigan Daily. It was during this time that he wrote his first work, No
Villain. Miller switched his major to English, and subsequently won the
Avery Hopwood Award for No Villain. He was mentored by Professor Kenneth
Rowe, who instructed him in his early forays into playwriting. Miller
retained strong ties to his alma mater throughout the rest of his life,
establishing the university's Arthur Miller Award in 1985 and Arthur
Miller Award for Dramatic Writing in 1999, and lending his name to the
Arthur Miller Theatre in 2000. In 1937, Miller wrote Honors at Dawn,
which also received the Avery Hopwood Award.
In 1938, Miller received a BA in English. After graduation, he joined
the Federal Theater Project, a New Deal agency established to provide
jobs in the theater. He chose the theater project although he had an
offer to work as a scriptwriter for 20th Century Fox. However, Congress,
worried about possible Communist infiltration, closed the project in
1939. Miller began working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard while continuing to
write radio plays, some of which were broadcast on CBS.
On August 5, 1940, he married his college sweetheart, Mary Slattery,
the Catholic daughter of an insurance salesman. The couple had two
children, Jane and Robert. Miller was exempted from military service
during World War II because of a high-school football injury to his left
kneecap. Robert, a writer and film director, produced the 1996 movie
version of The Crucible.
Early career
In 1940 Miller wrote The Man Who Had All the Luck, which was
produced in New Jersey in 1940 and won the Theatre Guild's National
Award. The play closed after four performances and disastrous reviews.
In his book Trinity of Passion, author Alan M. Wald conjectures that
Miller was "a member of a writer's unit of the Communist Party around
1946", using the pseudonym Matt Wayne, and editing a drama column in the
magazine The New Masses. In 1946 Miller's play All My Sons, the writing
of which had commenced in 1941, was a success on Broadway (earning him
his first Tony Award, for Best Author) and his reputation as a
playwright was established.
In 1948 Miller built a small studio in Roxbury, Connecticut. There,
in less than a day, he wrote Act I of Death of a Salesman. Within six
weeks, he completed the rest of the play, one of the classics of world
theater. Death of a Salesman premiered on Broadway on February 10, 1949
at the Morosco Theatre, directed by Elia Kazan, and starring Lee J. Cobb
as Willy Loman, Mildred Dunnock as Linda, Arthur Kennedy as Biff, and
Cameron Mitchell as Happy. The play was commercially successful and
critically acclaimed, winning a Tony Award for Best Author, the New York
Drama Circle Critics' Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was
the first play to win all three of these major awards. The play was
performed 742 times.
In 1952, Kazan appeared before the House Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC); fearful of being blacklisted from Hollywood, Kazan
named eight members of the Group Theatre, including Clifford Odets,
Paula Strasberg, Lillian Hellman, Joe Bromberg, and John Garfield, who
in recent years had been fellow members of the Communist Party. After
speaking with Kazan about his testimony Miller traveled to Salem,
Massachusetts to research the witch trials of 1692. The Crucible, in
which Miller likened the situation with the House Un-American Activities
Committee to the witch hunt in Salem, opened at the Beck Theatre on
Broadway on January 22, 1953. Though widely considered only somewhat
successful at the time of its initial release, today The Crucible is
Miller's most frequently produced work throughout the world and was
adapted into an opera by Robert Ward which won the Pulitzer Prize for
Music in 1962. Miller and Kazan remained close friends throughout the
late 1940s and early 1950s, but after Kazan's testimony to the HUAC, the
pair's friendship ended, and they did not speak to each other for the
next ten years. The HUAC took an interest in Miller himself not long
after The Crucible opened, denying him a passport to attend the play's
London opening in 1954. Kazan defended his own actions through his film
On the Waterfront, in which a dockworker heroically testifies against a
corrupt union boss.
Miller's experience with the HUAC affected him throughout his life.
In the late 1970s he became very interested in the highly publicized
Barbara Gibbons murder case, in which Gibbons' son Peter Reilly was
convicted of his mother's murder based on what many felt was a coerced
confession and little other evidence. City Confidential, an A&E Network
program about the murder, postulated that part of the reason Miller took
such an active interest (including supporting Reilly's defense and using
his own celebrity to bring attention to Reilly's plight) was because he
had felt similarly persecuted in his run-in with the HUAC. He
sympathized with Reilly, whom he firmly believed to be innocent and to
have been railroaded by the Connecticut State Police and the Attorney
General who had initially prosecuted the case.
Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe
1956–1964
In 1956 a one-act version of Miller's verse drama, A View From The
Bridge, opened on Broadway in a joint bill with one of Miller's
lesser-known plays, A Memory of Two Mondays. The following year, Miller
returned to A View from the Bridge, revising it into a two-act prose
version, which Peter Brook produced in London.
In June 1956 Miller left his first wife Mary Slattery, and on June
29, he married Marilyn Monroe. Miller and Monroe had first met in April
1951, when they had a brief affair, and had remained in contact since
then.
When Miller applied in 1956 for a routine renewal of his passport,
the HUAC used this opportunity to subpoena him to appear before the
committee. Before appearing, Miller asked the committee not to ask him
to name names, to which the chairman agreed.
When Miller attended the hearing, to which Monroe accompanied him,
risking her own career, he gave the committee a detailed account of his
political activities (leaving out the fact that he was a communist party
member). Reneging on the chairman's promise, the committee asked him to
reveal the names of friends and colleagues who had participated in
similar activities. Miller refused to comply with the request, saying "I
could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on him." As a
result a judge found Miller guilty of contempt of Congress in May 1957.
Miller was fined $500, sentenced to thirty days in prison, blacklisted,
and disallowed a U.S. passport. In 1958 his conviction was overturned by
the court of appeals, which ruled that Miller had been misled by the
chairman of the HUAC.
After his conviction was overturned, Miller began work on The
Misfits, starring his wife. Miller said that the filming was one of the
lowest points in his life, and shortly before the film's premiere in
1961, the pair divorced. Nineteen months later, Monroe died of an
apparent drug overdose.
Miller married photographer Inge Morath on February 17, 1962, and the
first of their two children, Rebecca, was born that September. Their son
Daniel was born with Down syndrome in November 1966, and was
consequently institutionalized and excluded from the Millers' personal
life at Arthur's insistence. The couple remained together until Inge's
death in 2002. Arthur Miller's son-in-law, actor Daniel Day-Lewis is
said to have visited Daniel frequently, and to have persuaded Arthur
Miller to reunite with his adult son.
Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe
Later career
In 1964 Miller's next play was produced. After the Fall is a deeply
personal view of Miller's experiences during his marriage to Monroe. The
play reunited Miller with his former friend Kazan: they collaborated on
both the script and the direction. After the Fall opened on January 23,
1964 at the ANTA Theatre in Washington Square Park amid a flurry of
publicity and outrage at putting a Monroe-like character, called Maggie,
on stage. That same year, Miller produced Incident at Vichy. In 1965,
Miller was elected the first American president of International PEN, a
position which he held for four years. During this period Miller wrote
the penetrating family drama, The Price, produced in 1968. It was
Miller's most successful play since Death of a Salesman.
In 1969, Miller's works were banned in the Soviet Union after he
campaigned for the freedom of dissident writers. Throughout the 1970s,
Miller spent much of his time experimenting with the theatre, producing
one-act plays such as Fame and The Reason Why, and traveling with his
wife, producing In The Country and Chinese Encounters with her. Both his
1972 comedy The Creation of the World and Other Business and its musical
adaptation, Up from Paradise, were critical and commercial failures.
In 1983, Miller traveled to the People's Republic of China to produce
and direct Death of a Salesman at the People's Art Theatre in Beijing.
The play was a success in China and in 1984, Salesman in Beijing, a book
about Miller's experiences in Beijing, was published. Around the same
time, Death of a Salesman was made into a TV movie starring Dustin
Hoffman as Willy Loman. Shown on CBS, it attracted 25 million viewers.
In late 1987, Miller's autobiographical work, Timebends, was published.
Before it was published, it was well-known that Miller would not talk
about Monroe in interviews; in Timebends Miller talks about his
experiences with Monroe in detail. During the early 1990s Miller wrote
three new plays, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee
(1992), and Broken Glass (1994). In 1996, a film of The Crucible
starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder opened. Miller spent much of
1996 working on the screenplay to the film. Mr. Peters' Connections was
staged off-Broadway in 1998, and Death of a Salesman was revived on
Broadway in 1999 to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. The play, once
again, was a large critical success, winning a Tony Award for best
revival of a play.
In 1993, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. In 2001 the
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) selected Miller for the
Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for
achievement in the humanities. Miller's lecture was entitled "On
Politics and the Art of Acting." Miller's lecture analyzed political
events (including the recent U.S. presidential election of 2000) in
terms of the "arts of performance", and it drew attacks from some
conservatives such as Jay Nordlinger, who called it "a disgrace", and
George Will, who argued that Miller was not legitimately a "scholar".
In 1999 Miller was awarded The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, one of
the richest prizes in the arts, given annually to “a man or woman who
has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to
mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life.” On May 1, 2002, Miller
was awarded Spain's Principe de Asturias Prize for Literature as "the
undisputed master of modern drama". Later that year, Ingeborg Morath
died of lymphatic cancer at the age of 78. The following year Miller won
the Jerusalem Prize.
In December 2004, the 89-year-old Miller announced that he had been
in love with 34-year-old minimalist painter Agnes Barley and had been
living with her at his Connecticut farm since 2002, and that they
intended to marry. Within hours of her father's death, Rebecca Miller
ordered Barley to vacate the premises, having consistently opposed the
relationship. Miller's final play, Finishing the Picture, opened at the
Goodman Theatre, Chicago, in the fall of 2004, with one character said
to be based on Barley. Miller said that the work was based on the
experience of filming The Misfits.
When interviewed by BBC4 for The Atheism Tapes, he stated that he had
been an atheist since his teens.
Miller died of heart failure after a battle against cancer, pneumonia
and congestive heart disease at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut. He had
been in hospice care at his sister's apartment in New York since his
release from hospital the previous month. He died on the evening of
February 10, 2005 (the 56th anniversary of the Broadway debut of Death
of a Salesman), aged 89, surrounded by Barley, family and friends.
Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe
Legacy
Miller's career as a writer spanned over seven decades, and at the
time of his death, Miller was considered to be one of the greatest
dramatists of the twentieth century. After his death, many respected
actors, directors, and producers paid tribute to Miller, some calling
him the last great practitioner of the American stage, and Broadway
theatres darkened their lights in a show of respect. Miller's alma
mater, the University of Michigan opened the Arthur Miller Theatre in
March, 2007. Per his express wish, it is the only theatre in the world
that bears Miller's name.
Christopher Bigsby wrote Arthur Miller: The Definitive Biography
based on boxes of papers Miller made available to him before his death
in 2005. The book was published in November 2008, and is reported to
reveal unpublished works in which Miller "bitterly attack[ed] the
injustices of American racism long before it was taken up by the civil
rights movement".
Miller's papers are housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research
Center at The University of Texas at Austin.
