Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller was born on West 110th Street in Manhattan on Oct. 17, 1915, to Augusta and Isidore Miller. His father was a coat manufacturer and so prosperous that he rode in a chauffeur-driven car from the family apartment overlooking the northern edge of Central Park to the Seventh Avenue garment district. He attended James Madison High School, graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1932, and then went to work in the auto-parts warehouse, earning $15 a week and saving $13 a week for college. Mr. Miller went to the University of Michigan with the hope that he could write a play good enough to win the Avery Hopwood Award. He went on to win two Hopwood Awards, as well as a $1,250 Bureau of New Plays Award from the Theater Guild. He earned more money by winning that one prize than he had earned in three years at the warehouse. In 1940 he had married his college sweetheart, Mary Grace Slattery, with whom he soon had two children. To support his family he worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, wrote scripts for radio and took a final shot at playwriting. Within two years of graduating, Mr. Miller had written six plays, every one of them rejected by producers except "The Man Who Had All the Luck." When it lasted only four performances on Broadway in 1944. In 1949 Willy Loman, riding on "a smile and a shoeshine" and determined to be not just liked but well liked, made his way into American consciousness in "Death of a Salesman." In 1956, Mr. Miller was himself called to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. By this time, his relationship with Marilyn Monroe had made him a far more public figure than any of the awards he had won, and therefore a prime target who could attract attention to the committee in its waning days. He and Marilyn Monroe had met in 1951 at a Hollywood party. For most of the four years of that marriage, Mr. Miller wrote almost nothing except "The Misfits," composed as a gift to his wife. After his 1961 divorce from Monroe, Mr. Miller married Inge Morath, the Austrian-born photographer, with whom he had a daughter, Rebecca Miller, a filmmaker. Ms. Morath died in 2002. In addition to Rebecca, who is married to the actor Daniel Day-Lewis, Mr. Miller is survived by the children of his first marriage, Jane Doyle of Roxbury, and Robert, of Laguna Beach, Calif.; a sister, Joan Copeland, an actress, of New York; and four grandchildren. He is also survived by his companion, Agnes Barley, a young painter whom he met shortly after Ms. Morath's death.