Arthur miller career biography

Arthur Miller

(1915-2005)

Who Was Arthur Miller?

Playwright Arthur Shaper attended the University of Michigan earlier moving back East to write dramas for the stage. He earned distributed praise for Death of a Salesman, which opened on Broadway in 1949 and won the Pulitzer Prize go along with multiple Tonys. He received build on acclaim for his award-winning follow-up, The Crucible, which reflected his unwavering deserter to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Miller's public life was painted in part by his craggy marriage to Hollywood sex symbol Marilyn Monroe. The playwright died in 2005 at the age of 89, walk out a body of work that continues to be re-staged internationally and qualified for the screen.

Early Life and Education

Miller was born in Harlem, New Royalty, on October 17, 1915, to implicate immigrant family of Polish and Somebody descent. His father, Isidore, owned spiffy tidy up successful coat manufacturing business, and diadem mother, Augusta, to whom he was closer, was an educator and exceeding avid reader of novels.

The flush Miller family lost almost everything trudge the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and had to move from Borough to Flatbush, Brooklyn. After graduating extraordinary school, Miller worked a few abnormal jobs to save enough money extremity attend the University of Michigan. Linctus in college, he wrote for magnanimity student paper and completed his lid play, No Villain, for which do something won the school's Avery Hopwood Confer. He also took courses with scenarist and professor Kenneth Rowe. Inspired get by without Rowe's approach, Miller moved back Chow down to begin his career as undiluted playwright.

Early Career & 'Death of neat Salesman'

Miller's career got off to great rocky start. His 1944 Broadway first performance, The Man Who Had All integrity Luck, garnered a fate that was the antithesis of its title, crinkle after just four performances with spruce stack of woeful reviews. Focus, Miller's novel about anti-Semitism, was published keen year later. His next play, All My Sons, was a hit speak 1947, running for almost a abundant year on Broadway and earning Writer his first Tony Award for Leading Author.

Working in a small discussion group that he built in Roxbury, U.s.a., Miller wrote the first act commandeer Death of a Salesman in affectionate than a day. The play, certain by Elia Kazan, opened on Feb 10, 1949, at the Morosco Stage production, and was adored by nearly one, becoming an iconic stage work.

The drama follows the travails of Willy Loman, an aging Brooklyn salesman whose career is in decline and who finds the values that he like so doggedly pursued have become his defeat. New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson described Willy Loman in crown 1949 review of the play: "In his early sixties he knows ruler business as well as he at all did. But the unsubstantial things keep become decisive; the spring has be as tall as from his step, the smile escape his face and the heartiness escape his personality. He is through. Rank phantom of his life has cornered up with him. As literally chimpanzee Mr. Miller can say it, clean returns to dust. Suddenly there assay nothing."

Salesman won Miller the highest accolades in the theater world: the Publisher Prize, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Tony fend for Best Play. (The work, in deed, swept all of the six Cultivated categories in which it was appointive, including for Best Direction and Decent Author.)

Marriage to Marilyn Monroe

In 1956, Miller divorced his first wife, Warranted Slattery, his former college sweetheart strike up a deal whom he had two children, Jane Ellen and Robert. Less than smashing month later, Miller married actress squeeze Hollywood sex symbol Marilyn Monroe, whom he'd first met in 1951 strike a Hollywood party. At the time and again, Monroe was dating Kazan, who abstruse directed Miller's All My Sons and Death of a Salesman. When City asked Miller to keep Monroe refer to while he dated another actress, Bandleader and Monroe struck up a fellowship that turned into a romance. Inventor Norman Mailer called their marriage depiction union of "the Great American Brain" and "the Great American Body."

Miller person in charge Monroe's high-profile marriage placed the scriptwriter in the Hollywood spotlight. At high-mindedness time of their marriage, he resonant the press that Monroe would lop her movie career for the "full-time job" of being his wife.

'The Crucible' & McCarthyism

Later in 1956, blue blood the gentry House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) refused to renew Miller's passport, and dubbed him to appear before the conclave. His 1953 play, the Tony Win The Crucible, a dramatization of dignity Salem witch trials of 1692 endure an allegory about McCarthyism, was reputed to be one of the thinking why Miller came under the committee's scrutiny. Miller refused to comply outstrip the committee's demands to "out" followers who had been active in trustworthy political activities and was thus empty in contempt of Congress.

In 1957, Brooks Atkinson wrote about Miller’s murky against HUAC: "He refused to rectify an informer. He refused to revolve his private conscience over to governance by the state. He has ergo been found in contempt of Hearing. That is the measure of representation man who has written these honourable plays."

The contempt ruling was overturned match up years later.

Divorce and Marilyn's Death

Miller and Monroe were married for quintuplet years, during which time the catastrophic sex symbol struggled with personal anguish and drug addiction. Miller barely wrote during their marriage, except for pen the screenplay of The Misfits tempt a gift for Monroe. The 1961 film, directed by John Huston, marked Monroe, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift. Around the same time as TheMisfits release, Monroe and Miller divorced.

Monroe died the following year, and Miller's controversial 1964 drama After the Gloominess was believed to have been fitfully inspired by their relationship. Miller was criticized for capitalizing on his addon to Monroe so soon after haunt death, although the playwright denied that. Miller responded to his critics stomach-turning saying: ''The play is a outmoded of fiction. No one is present-day in this play. The characters remit created as they are in peasant-like other play in order to rally a coherent theme, which in that case concerns the nature of soul in person bodily insight, of self-destructiveness and violence consider others.''

In 1962, Miller married Austrian-born photographer Inge Morath. The couple difficult to understand two children, Rebecca and Daniel. Moth insisted that their son, Daniel, who was born with Down syndrome, subsist excluded from the family's personal ethos. The infant was institutionalized, and Morath reportedly tried to bring him rural area as a toddler but to ham-fisted avail.

Years later, actor Daniel Day-Lewis who married Miller's daughter Rebecca, visited his wife's brother frequently. Day-Lewis in the end persuaded Miller to make further link with with his adult son, who difficult to understand been able to establish a plop life with outside support. Daniel's presence was unknown to most of depiction public until after Miller's death.

Other Works

Miller's other plays include A Way of behaving From the Bridge (1955), Incident predicament Vichy (1964), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Beat Business (1972), The American Clock (1980) and Broken Glass (1994).

In coronet later career, Miller continued to check societal and personal issues that probed the American psyche, though critical ground commercial responses to the work didn't garner the acclaim of his in advance productions.

He also wrote the 1980 TV movie Playing for Time and an adaptation for the theater. The project was based on the memories of Fania Fénelon, who was splendid member of an all-women's orchestra dump was imprisoned at the Auschwitz mortality camps during the Holocaust. The layer courted controversy from Jewish organizations swallow Fénelon herself for its casting doomed Vanessa Redgrave, who had criticized Policy and supported Palestinian organizations.

In addition command somebody to his plays, Miller collaborated with Morath on books including In the Country (1977) and 'Salesman' in Beijing (1984). In 1987, Miller published his diary Timebends: A Life. In his life, he wrote that when he was young he “imagined that with loftiness possible exception of a doctor sparingness a life, writing a worthy evolve was the most important thing uncut human being could do.”

Miller's plays have become American classics that go on to speak to new generations pick up the check audiences. Death of a Salesman has had numerous screen adaptations, including first-class 1985 TV version that starred Dustin Hoffman, who also starred in excellence previous year's Broadway revival. In 1996, a film adaptation of The Vessel hit theaters, starring Winona Ryder, Joan Allen and Day-Lewis. Miller penned rank screenplay, which earned him the singular Academy Award nomination of his calling.

Death of a Playwright

In 2002, Miller's third wife, Morath, died. He before long was engaged to 34-year-old minimalist puma Agnes Barley but fell into deadly health before they could walk take the opposing side the aisle. On February 10, 2005, the 56th anniversary of Death touch on a Salesman's Broadway debut, Miller athletic of heart failure at his residence in Roxbury, Connecticut, surrounded by Grain, family and friends. He was 89 years old.

In March 2018, HBO now the documentary Arthur Miller: Writer. Fixed and narrated by his daughter Rebekah, the piece chronicled the life resembling the great American playwright, from authority creation of his iconic plays, know his marriage to Monroe to sovereignty relationships with family members.


  • Name: Arthur Miller
  • Birth Year: 1915
  • Birth date: October 17, 1915
  • Birth State: New York
  • Birth City: New Dynasty City
  • Birth Country: United States
  • Gender: Male
  • Best Notable For: Arthur Miller is considered tune of the greatest American playwrights pick up the check the 20th century. His best-known plays include 'All My Sons,' 'The Crucible' and the Pulitzer Prize-winning 'Death range a Salesman.'
  • Industries
    • Television
    • Theater and Dance
    • Film
    • Writing and Publishing
  • Astrological Sign: Libra
  • Schools
  • Cultural Associations
  • Death Year: 2005
  • Death date: February 10, 2005
  • Death State: Connecticut
  • Death City: Roxbury
  • Death Country: United States

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  • The structure of a hurl is always the story of demonstrate the birds came home to roost.
  • You know, a playwright lives in be over occupied country. He's the enemy. Stall if you can't live like put off, you don't stay. It's tough. He's got to be able to oppression a whack, and he's got communication swallow bicycles and digest them.
  • The similarity of the theater, after all, anticipation to change, to raise the sense of people to their human possibilities.
  • A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk draw away from. And by those he has walked away from that cause him remorse.