Arthur Miller (89), the playwright whose authorship of such theatre classics as Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, All My Sons, and A View from the Bridge, made him a giant of the 20th century American stage, died yesterday of heart failure in Roxbury, Connecticut.
Miller's writing career spanned almost 50 years, beginning in the period immediately following the second World War, and it also included film scripts and television drama.
Among these were The Misfits, a 1961 movie written expressly for Marilyn Monroe, then Miller's wife, and Playing for Time, the true story of an inmates' orchestra at Auschwitz, which was broadcast on CBS television in 1980.
As a postwar playwright, Miller was a literary reflection of an era of metamorphosis and redefinition in America, following a great victory in the war. He wrote about the torments and tragedies of ordinary men and women struggling for dignity, respect and a sense of community in an increasingly dehumanised and impersonal world that they often did not understand.
His plays were both psychological and social. They explored the likes of misplaced and misunderstood values, out-of-control materialism, dysfunctional families, and conflicts between fathers and sons. Their characters were good people who frequently acted badly under pressure. They were insightful, but they had blind spots. They avoided reality and denied the truth when it was painful. They were assertive, yet indecisive; aggressive, but also timid.
It was during the decade immediately after the war that Miller wrote the best of his plays. The most critically acclaimed was the 1949 Pulitzer Prize-winning Death of a Salesman, the tragic story of the emotional collapse of Willy Loman, an ageing salesman, husband and father who has sold his soul for a set of hollow values. It has since been translated into 29 languages and is required reading in most university literature courses. It was made into a film starring Lee J. Cobb in 1951, and it has been reproduced hundreds of times all over the world.
The Crucible, Miller's timeless drama about the witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachussetts, during the 1600s, was an immediate hit when it opened in New York in 1953. The parallels between the witchcraft hysteria of 17th century Salem and the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy era gave it extraordinary power. Thirty years later The Crucible played to packed houses in Beijing, where Chinese audiences found similar parallels with the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.
All My Sons and A View from the Bridge were Miller's other major works of the postwar decade. The former was his first theatrical success, running for 300 performances on Broadway, beginning in January 1947.
In 1948 it was made into a film. It told the story of a respected manufacturer of aircraft parts who knowingly sells defective merchandise to the army during the war and then lies about it to protect his business. This causes the death of one of his sons in a plane crash and earns him the contempt of his other son, who discovers his father's duplicity and blames him for his brother's death.
A View from the Bridge was initially produced as a one-act play in 1955, and it received a poor reception from critics. Miller later expanded it to two acts which enjoyed a successful run in London and has since been revived several times in New York.
In 1962 it too was made into a movie. Its central character is longshoreman Eddie Carbone, who allows two illegal aliens to live with his family. When one of them falls in love with his niece, Eddie becomes irrationally jealous and turns him in to the immigration authorities, breaking a taboo of his ethnic community.
Ostracised by family and friends, Eddie is killed in a fight that he picks deliberately, knowing he cannot win.
Miller's playwriting career went into an eclipse in 1956, following his marriage to Marilyn Monroe. The marriage was troubled and tempestuous, and the couple were hounded relentlessly by the media. Monroe's dependence on barbiturates and her profound emotional problems compounded their difficulties.
In 1961 he wrote the movie script for The Misfits as a last ditch effort to save the marriage - and Monroe's life.
It was an exploration of the dying myth of the Wild West cowboy through the experiences of three drifters and a tormented divorcee.
John Huston directed the film which co-starred Clark Gable, and both Miller's script and Huston's direction won critical praise. But the picture was not a box office success and shortly after completion of its filming, Monroe filed for divorce. In 1962 she committed suicide.
In a 1987 autobiography, Timebends, completed when he was 72, Miller wrote vividly and painfully of his marriage to Monroe, describing her as a woman haunted by ghosts of an unhappy childhood that eventually destroyed her.
He described himself as a hapless onlooker, unable to save her or in the end endure her rages against him. She was, he said, the saddest woman he had ever met and his account of their troubled four-year marriage was as powerful as any drama he ever penned.
In 1964, Miller took up playwriting again with After the Fall, a drama about a lawyer struggling to resolve past crises in his life, including the suicide of his wife and his confrontation with the communist hunting House Un-American Activities Committee. Despite Miller's denials, the play was widely viewed as autobiographical, and Miller was criticised for having taken advantage of his life with Monroe and his relationship with colleagues who had turned informer during the McCarthy era.
Like many other artists of his generation, Miller had attended meetings of communist writers' groups as a young man, and in 1956 he was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee about these meetings during an investigation into passport abuses. He answered all questions put to him by the committee except two, refusing to name persons he might have met at the meetings.
"I will protect my sense of myself. I could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on him," Miller told the committee. This brought him a conviction for contempt of Congress from a judge who found his motives "commendable" but nevertheless illegal, and a sentence of three months probation plus a $500 fine.
Two years later Miller's counsel, Washington lawyer, Joseph L. Rauh Junior, won a reversal of the conviction by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Arthur Miller was born on October 17th, 1915, in New York. He attended high school in Brooklyn where his performances on the athletic fields were more impressive than in the classroom. Not until he had graduated did he acquire any literary ambitions, and this came only after he had read The Brothers Karamazov which had a profound effect on him.
He held a variety of clerical and warehouse jobs, then in 1934 entered the University of Michigan where he studied playwriting, supporting himself by washing dishes and working as night editor of the student newspaper. He also won several playwriting prizes, but none of his college plays was produced.
It was at Michigan that Miller met his first wife, the former Mary Slattery. They were married in 1940 and divorced in 1956. The marriage produced two children, Jane Ellen and Robert.
Exempt from the draft because of a football injury, Miller spent the second World War years writing radio dramas, while working part time as a truck driver and a steamfitter at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He wrote his only novel, Focus, about an obsequious personnel director, in 1945, but the book went largely unnoticed.
His first Broadway effort, The Man Who Had All the Luck, about a Midwest car mechanic, met a similar fate, closing after four performances. The playwright then spent two years writing All My Sons which established him as a figure in the literary community and enabled him to buy a 350-acre farm in Roxbury, Connecticut, where he built a studio and wrote the rest of his plays.
It was there that Miller resumed his playwriting career following his divorce from Monroe and his marriage in 1962 to Inge Morath, an Austrian-born photographer. They had one daughter, Rebecca.
His literary production over the next quarter century was steady, and his work played both in the US and England to a variety of reviews. But he never achieved the literary heights of the first decade after the war.
Among his better-known plays of the latter period in his career were Incident at Vichy (1964), which addressed one man's sacrifice in saving the live of a Jewish doctor in Nazi-occupied France; The Price (1969), a family drama about two brothers meeting to dispose of their dead parents furniture; The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), a retelling of the story of Genesis in which issues of responsibility and guilt are addressed; and The American Clock (1980), a portrait of the Great Depression that was better received in London than in the US.
Playing for Time, the 1980 television drama about the inmates' orchestra at Auschwitz, starring Vanessa Redgrave, drew enthusiastic reviews and has been rebroadcast several times.
In person, Miller was uniquely American, direct and down-to-earth, especially in the way he talked - in a distinct Brooklyn growl - during interviews. During one such conversation, he talked about Broken Glass, one of his little-known plays that had a short life on Broadway.
"There's no dancing girls, no orchestra, no fireworks going off. It's just people on a stage talking to each other. But that's what theatre is all about." he said.
Arthur Miller: born October 17th, 1915; died February 11th, 2005.