Friday, 1 July 2011

Death of a Playwright: Legend Arthur Miller Dies Aged 89

Arthur Miller, a giant of American drama for over 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.

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 Joe McCarthy's House of Un-American Activities Commission in 1956, where he refused to name the names of his friends with communist sympathies. While his play The Crucible was nominally set in 17th-century Massachusetts, most viewers correctly identified it as a criticism of the McCarthy witchunts.

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.

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