Death of a playwright: legend Arthur Miller dies aged 89
Xan Brooks
Friday February 11, 2005
Arthur Miller, a giant of American drama for nearly 60 years, is dead. According to reports, the 89-year-old playwright passed away at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut. He had been suffering from cancer, pneumonia and a heart condition.
The son of Polish-Jewish immigrants, Miller's comfortable middle-class New York childhood was shattered when his father lost his fortune during the Great Depression. The experience would later form the basis of his breakthrough play, 1949's Death of a Salesman, a savage assault on the American dream. "He had the wrong dreams," Biff says of his father, the hapless, desperate Willy Loman. "All, all wrong."
Other classic Miller plays include All My Sons, The Crucible and View From a Bridge. He also wrote a novel, Focus, and an acclaimed autobiography Timebends.
A leading light of the left-wing theatre scene, Miller was called to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Commission in 1956. Other artists buckled when targeted by Joe McCarthy's witch-hunters. Miller did not, steadfastly refusing to provide the names of friends with communist sympathies. For good measure, he also damned his tormentors in his work: while The Crucible was nominally set in 17th-century Salem, most viewers knew precisely that its target was rather close to home.
In the eyes of many, however, Miller will be best remembered for his marriage to Marilyn Monroe. The couple - nicknamed the hourglass and the egg-head by the US press - wed in 1956 but the marriage fell apart on the set of the film The Misfits in 1961, which he scripted. The writer later explored their turbulent relationship in his 1962 play After the Fall, and in his last play, Finishing the Picture (2004), he turned back the clock to explore the making of the troubled movie.
"He helped to define American drama," said Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington. "What one forgets is that he had to create a tradition rather than inheriting one."
"He was the great conscience of the American nation - and a damn good playwright in every sense," commented theate writer and reviewer Lyn Gardner. "Play writing is often seen as a young person's art these days... but Miller well into his 70s was continuing to write elegant and beautifully constructed plays."
"Some of his works - Death of a Salesman, the View from the Bridge - are among the greatest plays of the 20th century."
Miller married photographer Inge Morath in 1962 and was with her until her death in 2002. He is survived by his four children - Jane and Robert, from his first marriage to Mary Slattery, and Rebecca and Daniel, from his marriage with Morath.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1411098,00.html
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