The soul of the American playwright Arthur Miller is more tangible than ever. Seventy years after the first performance of his incendiary play The Crucible, there was recently a new production at London’s National Theatre, starring House of the Dragon’s Milly Alcock. Adrien Brody played Miller with elegant mystique in Blonde, last year’s unflinching biopic about his wife Marilyn Monroe. Arthur Miller: Writer, the 2017 HBO documentary made by Miller’s daughter Rebecca, revealed new depths and complexities to a figure who, by his own definition, wrote about what was “in the air”, though often from a lateral or allegorical perspective that gave his work an extra prescience.
Arthur Asher Miller was born in October 1915 in Harlem, New York into a family of Jewish-Polish descent. His father, Isidore, owned a successful women’s clothing business that brought the Millers wealth, two houses and a chauffeur, but he lost almost observed, Miller drew from his father’s financial disaster (like Dickens and Ibsen) a lifelong conviction that catastrophe could strike without warning — a key motif he’d come to explore in his plays.
