Arthur Miller, a giant of 20th century theatre still working into the 21st century, has died at his home in Connecticut, aged 89. Tributes poured in from the international theatre community last night, which had somehow assumed that the creator of an American archetype in Willy Loman, noble tragic hero of Death of a Salesman, would live and write forever.
”He was one of the playwrights who made the 20th century the American century,” playwright David Hare said last night. ”When you think about American theatre it’s Miller, Tennessee Williams, O’Neill – and now we’ve lost them all.”
Oscar nominated director Mike Leigh said: ”I’m very, very sad. Death of a dramatist – what can you say. He is the grandaddy of us all, really. We modestly try and put social issues on screen and stage through character. He’s our model for all that.”
Nicholas Hytner, director of the National Theatre, who also directed the film of The Crucible, called him ”the last of the great titans of the American stage”.
He added: ”With Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams he brought to the English speaking theatre a poetic urgency and tragic sweep that had been absent since the Elizabethan era. His models were the great classical tragedians and, more recently, Ibsen; and I have no doubt that plays like Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge will always stand with the masterpieces of Ibsen, Shakespeare and Sophocles.”
The American playwright Edward Albee said Miller had once flattered him by describing his plays as ”necessary”’: ”I will go one step further and say that Arthur’s plays are essential.”
Film and stage director David Thacker said: ”There is no playwright as great as Shakespeare, but if you leave Shakespeare out of the frame he is as great as any writer in the history of playwriting.”
Miller died of heart failure on Thursday night, a week after he was sent home from hospital.
The New York Post reported that among the family and friends who gathered at his bedside, as it became clear that he would lose his fight against cancer, a heart condition and pneumonia, was his girlfriend, the painter Agnes Barley, 34.
”He was a big man and a deeply American man who was lucky enough to have extraordinary women in his life,” Zoe Caldwell, the Australian-born actress who starred on Broadway in his The Creation of the World and Other Business, told Reuters. ”He was busy working on plays right until he got sick. He had such a great life that you don’t feel sad for Arthur.”
Success – and money – came early and apparently easily to Miller, who won a shelf of prizes for All My Sons in 1947, and swept the board with Death of a Salesman in 1949, a play which took him six weeks to write. An apparently all-American play moved audiences all over the world, and he directed it himself in China in 1983.
The play won him a Pulitzer prize, but many observers pointed out last night that for half a century he was a blazingly obvious candidate for a Nobel, but never got one.
The Crucible, based on the 17th century Salem witch trials, but a bitter indictment of McCarthy era America, is his most performed work and is a set text in many American schools.
His marriage to Marilyn Monroe in 1956 was a media sensation from first to weary last five years later. He said in a newspaper interview that it took all his energy to bolster her tottering self confidence, but described her unforgettably in his 1987 autobiography as ”a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes”.
The year after their divorce he married for the third time, to photographer Inge Morath, and Monroe died of a drug overdose – whether by suicide or accident, still one of the most debated showbusiness deaths.
The British theatre was credited with reviving his career in the late 1980s and early 90s, when America seemed briefly bored with him and he with it.
In 1991 he premiered The Ride Down Mt Morgan in London, the first time he had opened a play outside the US.
Hytner said that Britain relished Miller. ”In recent decades he has been more welcome on the London stage than in his native New York. We have felt more comfortable with the uncompromising morality of his world view than his compatriots. America felt rebuked by him.
”Over here, we relish the ferocity of his arguments with the way things are. Many Americans have felt insulted by them. His refusal to meet them half way was the magnificent stubbornness of the great artist.”
David Thacker, who directed most of Miller’s major plays during his 10 years running the Young Vic theatre, and the award winning British premiere of Broken Glass at the National, said: ”He loved English actors. He once said to me that if an actor is pointing the wrong way for a production and you say no, it’s that direction, they’ll just do it. With a lot of American actors, he said, ‘it’d take an hour just to get them down off the ceiling’.”
Miller never took his own work for granted. When Thacker suggested, diffidently, that one speech in Broken Glass needed a little more work, he came home that night to find the rewritten speech dictated on to his answering machine.
He added: ”Actors worshipped him. Very good actors understand when they’re working with material that comes from a genius.” – Guardian Unlimited Â