RIP, Sir. You were an inspiration until the very end - OEC
Arthur Miller dies at 89; American playwright
By Marilyn Berger The New York Times
Saturday, February 12, 2005
Arthur Miller, one of the great contemporary playwrights, whose work exposed the flaws in the fabric of the American dream, died Thursday night at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut. He was 89.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said Julia Bolus, his assistant.
The author of "Death of a Salesman," a landmark of 20th-century drama, Miller grappled with the weightiest matters of social conscience in his plays.
They often reflected or reinterpreted the stormy and very public elements of his own life, including a brief and rocky marriage to Marilyn Monroe and his staunch refusal to cooperate with the red-baiting House Committee on Un-American Activities.
"Death of a Salesman," which opened on Broadway in 1949, established Miller as a giant of the theater when he was only 33.
It won the triple crown of theatrical artistry that year: the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Tony Award.
But the play's enormous success also overshadowed Miller's long career.
Although "The Crucible," a 1953 play about the Salem witch trials inspired by his virulent hatred of McCarthyism, and "A View From the Bridge," a 1955 drama of obsession and betrayal, would ultimately take their place as popular classics of the international stage, Miller's later plays never equaled his early successes.
Although Miller wrote a total of 17 plays, "The Price," produced on Broadway during the 1967-68 season, was the playwright's last solid critical and commercial hit.
Nevertheless, Miller wrote successfully in a wide variety of other media.
Perhaps most notably, he supplied the screenplay for "The Misfits," a 1961 movie directed by John Huston and starring Monroe, to whom he was married at the time. He also wrote essays, short stories and a 1987 autobiography, "Timebends: A Life."
His writing remained politically engaged until the end of his life. He was an outspoken critic of President George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq.
But Miller's reputation rests on a handful of his best-known plays, the dramas of guilt and betrayal and redemption that continue to be revived frequently at theaters all over the world. These dramas of social conscience were drawn from life and informed by the Great Depression, the event that he believed had had a more profound impact on the nation than any other in American history, except possibly the Civil War.
"In play after play," the drama critic Mel Gussow wrote in The New York Times, "he holds man responsible for his and for his neighbor's actions."
The Broadway producer Robert Whitehead, who worked frequently with Miller, found a "rabbinical righteousness" in the playwright.
Miller once said that writing plays was for him like breathing. He wrote in "Timebends" that when he was young, he "imagined that with the possible exception of a doctor saving a life, writing a worthy play was the most important thing a human being could do."
He also saw playwriting as a way to change America, and, as he put it, "that meant grabbing people and shaking them by the back of the neck."
Miller was born on West 110th Street in Manhattan on Oct. 17, 1915, to Augusta and Isidore Miller. His father was a coat manufacturer, and so prosperous that he rode in a chauffeur-driven car from the family apartment overlooking the northern edge of Central Park to the Seventh Avenue garment district.
The Depression changed everything for the family, and it became a theme that etched its way through Arthur Miller's plays, from "Death of a Salesman" to "The Price" and "After the Fall," from "The American Clock" to "A Memory of Two Mondays." The crash meant the collapse of the coat business and a move from the apartment overlooking the park to reduced circumstances in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn.
Acclaimed as a modern American masterpiece in its first reviews and translated into 29 languages, "Salesman" was no sooner a success on Broadway than it was savaged in the intellectual journals as sentimental melodrama or Marxist propaganda.
In 1956, Miller was called to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He was applauded in Hollywood and in New York theater circles when he refused to name names, a courageous act in an atmosphere of palpable fear. He was cited for contempt of Congress, although he said he had never joined the Communist Party.
In 1956, even as Miller's testimony had continued, he and Monroe were married, a union that Norman Mailer sourly remarked brought together "the Great American Brain" and "the Great American Body."
For most of the four years of that marriage, Miller wrote almost nothing except "The Misfits."
The film would premiere early 1961, shortly after the couple's marriage ended in divorce.
A year later, Miller would remarry, and six months after that, Monroe would be found dead, a suicide, at her house in Los Angeles.
In a biography of Monroe, Maurice Zolotow wrote that Miller had "to give up his entire time to attend to her wants."
He was once asked if he had resented having to care for her to the detriment of his work.
"Oh, yeah," he answered.
"After the Fall," his most overtly autobiographical play, brought Miller a storm of criticism when it was produced in 1964, shortly after Monroe's death.
After his autobiography was published in 1987, he reflected in an interview on the course he had taken in life. "It has gone through my mind how much time I wasted in the theater, if only because when you write a book you pack it up and send it off," he said.
"In the theater, you spend months casting actors who are busy in the movies anyway and then to get struck down in half an hour, as has happened to me more than once.
"You have to say to yourself: 'Why do it? It's almost insulting."'
But when asked how he wanted to be remembered, he did not hesitate. "I hope as a playwright," he said. "That would be all of it."
Charles Isherwood and Jesse McKinley contributed reporting for this article.
