Obit: Arthur Miller

Subject: Obit: Arthur Miller
From: GUEST
Date: 11 Feb 05 - 09:50 PM

Here is page one of a six page obituary from today's New York Times.

One of the greatest playwrights in the English language of the 20th century.

Arthur Miller, Legendary American Playwright, Is Dead
By MARILYN BERGER

Published: February 11, 2005


rthur Miller, one of the great American playwrights, whose work exposed the flaws in the fabric of the American dream, died Thursday at his home in Roxbury, Conn. 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, Mr. Miller grappled with the weightiest matters of social conscience in his plays and in them often reflected or reinterpreted the stormy and very public elements of his own life: among them, 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 Mr. Miller as a giant of the American theater when he was only 33 years old. It won the triple crown of theatrical artistry that year: the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Tony.

But the play's enormous success also overshadowed Mr. Miller's long career. "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, ultimately took their place as popular classics of the international stage, but Mr. Miller's later plays never equaled his early successes.

Although he wrote a total of 17 plays, "The Price," produced on Broadway during the 1967-68 season, was his last solid critical and commercial hit.

Mr. Miller also 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. Mr. Miller was an outspoken critic of President Bush.

But his 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 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."

Elia Kazan, who directed "All My Sons," "Death of a Salesman" and "After the Fall," once recalled in an interview, "In the 30's and 40's, we came out of the Group Theater tradition that every play should teach a lesson and make a thematic point."

"Arthur organized his plays so that they came to a thematic climax," Kazan said. "He urged you to accept the thematic point."

The Broadway producer Robert Whitehead, who worked frequently with Mr. Miller, said, in reminiscing about their work together, that he found a "rabbinical righteousness" in the playwright.

"In his work, there is almost a conscious need to be a light unto the world," he said, adding, "He spent his life seeking answers to what he saw around him as a world of injustice." After Mr. Miller's death was announced, Jed Bernstein, president of the League of American Theaters and Producers, said that the lights at Broadway theaters would be dimmed at curtain time in his memory. l

Mr. Miller, a lanky, wiry man whose dark hair turned to gray in his later years, retained the appearance of a 1930's intellectual whether he was wearing work boots and bluejeans while fixing his back porch or seated behind his word processor - or typewriter, when the power failed at his 350-acre farm in Litchfield County.

Writing plays was for him, he once said, 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."

Subject: RE: Obit: Arthur Miller
From: Peace
Date: 11 Feb 05 - 09:52 PM

Oh, man oh man. This one hurts.

Subject: RE: Obit: Arthur Miller
From: Peter K (Fionn)
Date: 11 Feb 05 - 11:59 PM

Number One of the American Big Three, for my money. I saw a clip of him on the news tonight, talking about The Crucible and how it related to US anti-commie hysteria after WW2. He said he'd concluded that there was a propensity in all of us to panic, which he found distasteful and alarming. Maybe if more people had seen the play, America might have been spared all that panic after 9-11 (another reaction which Miller found frightening).

One of the really great guys of the 20th century - or any other.

Subject: RE: Obit: Arthur Miller
From: Amos
Date: 12 Feb 05 - 01:49 AM

Second that, Fionn; a Giver of Legacy; the Crucible all by itself is the most improtant play of the era, I would say.


A

Subject: RE: Obit: Arthur Miller
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 12 Feb 05 - 04:56 AM

A man of erudition and integrity, both in his work and in his loyalty to his friends in those dark days of McCarthyism. It is a shame that the first thing many people think when they hear the name is, 'He was married to Marylin Munro'.
Giok

Subject: RE: Obit: Arthur Miller
From: alanabit
Date: 12 Feb 05 - 05:07 AM

I agree with every word of the above. As a playwright he was indeed a giant, but he was also a very fine journalist. It was not just that his heaart was in the right place and his mind came down on the right side. He was also a very fine (and sophisticated) portrayer of the human condition. That is what marked him out from the merely very good.

Subject: RE: Obit: Arthur Miller
From: GUEST,milk monitor
Date: 12 Feb 05 - 05:38 AM

I saw The Crucible just before Christmas, and can gladly report that the theatre was packed with schools parties, so at least his message will continue. Sad news.

Subject: RE: Obit: Arthur Miller
From: Peter K (Fionn)
Date: 12 Feb 05 - 09:07 AM

Good point, alanabit. His legacy includes some inspiring essays.

Subject: RE: Obit: Arthur Miller
From: M.Ted
Date: 12 Feb 05 - 11:10 AM

Here is an obit from the French News service, with additional info and quotes:

        Ê ÊÊÊ         

Ê        Writers mourn Arthur Miller (12/02/2005)

        Ê

Ê        NEW YORK (AFP) Major literary figures from around the world mourned the passing of American playwright Arthur Miller, calling him a leader in both literature and life.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author, who died late Thursday at his home in Connecticut, aged 89, had been suffering from cancer, pneumonia and a heart condition.

"He was a landmark, he was a leader, and I was extremely attached to him," British playwright Harold Pinter said, calling Miller's plays some of the finest works produced in the last century.

"He was unremitting and remorseless in using his critical intelligence. He did this both as a man and as a playwright, and that's why he's such a remarkable figure," Pinter said in remarks taped by the BBC.

"The news of his death moved me a lot, because I was his friend since the 1960s," former Czech president and playwright Vaclav Havel said in Prague.

"I consider him to be the greatest playwright of the 20th century. His death is a great loss for world literature," Havel said.

Salman Rushdie called Miller "a man of true moral stature, a rare quality in these degraded days."

"Writing meant, for him, an effort to locate in the human species a counterforce to the randomness of victimization'," Rushdie said.

Miller won international acclaim for works such as the "Death of a Salesman" and "The Crucible" that tapped into the malaise of post-war America and the hunt for suspected communists.

He led a colourful and controversial career that included a well-publicised romance with starlet Marilyn Monroe and bitter squabbles over his links to the Communist party in the United States.

Despite decades of success, his work was preoccupied with the question of failure and personal tragedy in the American working class -- a theme etched into his soul growing up in the midst of the Great Depression.

The son of Jewish immigrants of Polish origin, Miller was born in New York on October 17, 1915.

His early years were marked by the desperation of his father, whose garment business collapsed amid the Depression, and the physical, moral and financial strains those difficult years placed on society at large.

After university in Michigan, Miller returned to New York and his first play, "The Man Who Had All The Luck," opened in 1944.

The play, about a financially successful man who is nevertheless unhappy, presaged one of the great themes of his life's work, but was met with scathing reviews.

Two years later, however, his first Broadway production, "All My Sons," marked his first success. The play, about a businessman who sells defective parts to the US military, touched a chord with post-war American audiences.

But it was "Death of a Salesman" in 1949 that established Miller's career.

The story of Willy Loman, a failed businessman who looks back on his life before killing himself to leave insurance money for his son, was compared to Dostoevsky and Shakespeare, and won the Pulitzer Prize.

The play ran for hundreds of performances and was translated into dozens of languages. It made Miller an instant millionaire.

The third of his major works, 1953's "The Crucible," looked back for inspiration to the earliest days of America in dramatising the infamous witch-hunts of Salem, Massachusetts in the 17th century.

But contemporary audiences clearly saw Miller's true meaning in the play, which was a searing indictment of American paranoia about the spread of Communism in the United States -- and, yet again, the tale of ordinary lives ruined.

Life appeared to then imitate art as three years later Miller was summoned before the House Committee on Un-American Activities which was seeking to purge Hollywood of suspected "reds" during the so-called McCarthy era.

Miller sat before the panel after director Elia Kazan testified Miller had attended Communist meetings.

The playwright's conviction for contempt of Congress -- he declined to name names of others -- was overturned but the personal strain remained. His turbulent front-page marriage to Monroe, the pin-up girl of her day, was short-lived.

Apart from "After The Fall," about Monroe, later decades saw him produce little of note as Miller drifted away from his trademark themes. But Miller also found lasting love with photographer Inge Morath, who died in 2002.

After the economic boom of the 1980s, Miller's work touched a new generation as both revivals and new plays brought him a second wave of success with American audiences. He also remained a committed political activist.

Miller won many major artistic awards in the United States, including the National Medal of the Arts, and his work was hailed as a watershed, bringing a stinging humanist realism to the American stage.

He leaves a daughter, Rebecca, an actress and writer who is married to the actor Daniel Day-Lewis, as well as grandchildren.

        Ê
Ê        ©AFP         Ê

Subject: RE: Obit: Arthur Miller
From: Peter T.
Date: 12 Feb 05 - 11:38 AM

The most interesting article I ever read about Miller's impact was about the impact of Death of a Salesman on the first audiences.   There were a number of descriptions of ordinary middle class men weeping uncontrollably as the play tightened its grip around their throats. One quote that stuck in my mind was from a businessman somewhere who said Miller should be hung for revealing the naked horror of being a man in midcentury America.

yours,

Peter T.

Subject: RE: Obit: Arthur Miller
From: GUEST
Date: 12 Feb 05 - 01:09 PM

As important a play as I believe "The Crucible" was in it's time, I think "Death of a Salesman" is his best play, without a doubt. My father was a salesman who became management, and that play by Miller haunted him. Eventually, he was thrown out of the corporate hierarchy and became a free agent broker, which suited his intellect and temper much better than being a company man ever had. He barely escaped Willie Loman's fate.

Now, of course, we are being ruled by the sons and grandsons of the men who crushed the Willie Lomans of this world. They are called Republicans. And just as ironically, many of those men are women--soccer moms, women entrepreneurs, etc.

Subject: RE: Obit: Arthur Miller
From: GUEST
Date: 12 Feb 05 - 01:21 PM

And thank you, MTed, for the obituary you posted. It is far superior to the one the NY Times wrote, isn't it?

Subject: RE: Obit: Arthur Miller
From: Peter K (Fionn)
Date: 13 Feb 05 - 01:08 PM

Guest 1.09pm: Interesting post. I would certainly put "Death of a Salesman" top of the list myself, but I'm not an American. To me it crammed more of the essence of America at that time into a single work than any book or play before or since.

Has Bob Hoskins ever played Willie Loman? I'd be hard-pressed to think of a better match between actor and character.