Playwright Arthur Miller dies, aged 89

Arthur Miller, the prize-winning playwright who was once married to screen icon Marilyn Monroe, has died, his assistant said.

Miller, whose most famous fictional creation, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, came to symbolise the American Dream gone awry, was 89 years old.

He died last night, said Julia Bolus in Connecticut. She did not give a cause of death.

Miller’s plays, with their strong emphasis on family, morality and personal responsibility, spoke to the growing fragmentation of US society.

“A lot of my work goes to the centre of where we belong – if there is any root to life – because nowadays the family is broken up, and people don’t live in the same place for very long,” Miller said in a 1988 interview.

“Dislocation, maybe, is part of our uneasiness. It implants the feeling that nothing is really permanent.”

Miller’s career was marked by early success. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Death of a Salesman in 1949, when he was just 33 years old.

His marriage to screen star Marilyn Monroe in 1956 further catapulted the playwright to fame, though that was publicity he said he never pursued.

In a 1992 interview with a French newspaper, he called her ”highly self-destructive” and said that during their marriage, “all my energy and attention were devoted to trying to help her solve her problems. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much success”.