Playwright Miller dies, aged 89

ARTHUR MILLER, considered one of America's greatest playwrights, has died. He was 89.

Miller, who was once married to screen legend Marilyn Monroe, died on Thursday night at his home in Roxbury of heart failure, his assistant, Julia Bolus, said. His family was at his bedside, she said.

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 Marilyn Monroe in 1956 further catapulted the playwright to fame, though it was publicity he said he never wanted.

In a 1992 interview, 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."

Death of a Salesman, which took Miller only six weeks to write, earned rave reviews when it opened on Broadway in February 1949, directed by Elia Kazan.

The story of Willy Loman, a man destroyed by his own stubborn belief in the glory of American capitalism and the redemptive power of success, was made into a movie and staged all over the world.

"I couldn't have predicted that a work like Death of a Salesman would take on the proportions it has," Miller said in 1988. "Originally, it was a literal play about a literal salesman, but it has become a bit of a myth."

In 1999, 50 years after it won the Tony Award as best play, Death of a Salesman won the Tony for best revival of the Broadway season. Miller, then 83, received a lifetime achievement award. "Just being around to receive it is a pleasure," he joked.

Miller won the New York Drama Critics' Circle's best play award twice in the 1940s, for All My Sons in 1947 and for Death of a Salesman. In 1953, he received a Tony Award for The Crucible, a play about mass hysteria during the Salem witch trials that was inspired by the repressive political environment of McCarthyism.

Miller wrote the screenplay for the Monroe film The Misfits, which came out in 1960. He and Monroe divorced in 1961 and in 1962 he married his third wife, photographer Inge Morath. That same year, Monroe committed suicide.

Miller's success, so overwhelming in the 1940s and 1950s, seemed to be on the wane during the next two decades. But the 1980s brought a renewal of interest, beginning with a Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman starring Dustin Hoffman in 1984.

Miller was born on October 17, 1915, one of three children in a middle-class Jewish family.

He had two children, Jane Ellen and Robert, by his first wife, Mary Slattery, and he and Morath had one daughter, Rebecca, who is married to actor Daniel Day-Lewis.