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That applies to Miller. He had a point of view, of the liberal-humanist tinge, and crafted characters and plots around them. Which often made for potent drama that triumphed over his often earthbound attempts at poetic dialogue. His opposite number would be Tennessee Williams, whose works were informed less by a great statement than by lushly poetic dialogue and insights into the world's fallen eccentrics.
It follows that Miller wrote man's plays, burly, sometimes muscle-bound. He provided terrific roles to forceful actors — stardom to his first Willy Loman, Lee J. Cobb (who, at 37 on opening night, was just two years and two months older than Arthur Kennedy, who played his son). Fredric March and Dustin Hoffman were enriched by playing Willy in later versions now available on film. George C. Scott had a parallel career in Miller plays; he was Willy in a 1975 Broadway revival, and co-starred with his wife Colleen Dewhurst in TV versions of The Crucible and a later work, The Price. Steve McQueen went bearded and serious in a 1978 film of An Enemy of the People.
Contrast this to Williams, who naturally, almost preternaturally, wrote great roles for women: The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Night of the Iguana and Suddenly, Last Summer, to stop involuntarily at six. William Inge, the other of the 50s' Big Three playwrights, did all right by women too: Bus Stop, Picnic and Come Back, Little Sheba, among others. But in the plays of Miller's prime, the only female character with any vibrancy (and this is debatable) is Maggie in After the Fall — a character based on Miller's one-time movie-star wife.
MR. MARILYN MONROE
In 1956, Miller won a notoriety the broader public could cherish: he wed Marilyn Monroe. (And I can't tell you how proud I am that I spent 1,400 words on Miller before getting to Marilyn.) It was a marriage out of Central Miscasting: one of the top postwar American playwrights and the definitive movie star. Granted, the other members of the Big Three were homosexual; still it was quite a coup. And a benison for the tabloid press: the egghead and the bombshell. If Adlai Stevenson had married Jayne Mansfield, the contrast couldn't have been more delicious,
It all went wrong very quickly. Miller, who in seven years had written three full plays, two one-acters and an adaptation, put no new work on Broadway for another eight years. Monroe became the prototype "difficult" star and lost some of her sexily innocent allure under the education in acting she received from Lee and Paula Strasberg. The one film Miller wrote for Monroe, The Misfits, was a calamity during shooting and a frayed failure on release. The couple divorced in January 1961, before the movie came out, and 19 months later Monroe was dead.
That was the popular image of Miller — the intellectual who couldn't make the movie star happy — and it has held for more than 40 years. The obituary headlines will mention Death of a Salesman, but the people will think of Marilyn. Popular culture couldn't stop thinking of the unlikely pairing. At least two musicals from the mid-80s, one on Broadway (Marilyn, a Musical Fable) and one in London (plain old Marilyn) had featured roles for Miller. A 1980 telefilm version of Norman Mailer's biographical essay Marilyn, renamed Marilyn: The Untold Story, starred Jason Miller as the playwright and Catherine Hicks as MM. A 1996 TV movie, Norma Jean & Marilyn, with Mira Sorvino as Marilyn and David Dukes as Miller. And in 2000 Joyce Carol Oates tried a roman-a-clef novel, Blonde, where Miller was ID'd as "the Playwright."
The first writer to exploit the Marilyn-Miller marriage was Miller himself, in two plays that added little luster to his reputation. After the Fall came in 1964, a mere two years after Monroe's death; directed by Kazan, it starred Jason Robards, Jr., as Quentin (Miller) and Barbara Loden as Maggie (Marilyn); ten years later there was a TV movie, with Faye Dunaway and Christopher Plummer. Critics found the play unsporting at best, mean-spirited and necrophagic at worst. In fighting and fidgeting with the personal demons of his celebrity, Miller hadn't renounced blaming.
And, just last year, Finishing the Picture, about the making and unmaking of The Misfits, which was staged at Chicago's Goodman Theater with Matthew Modine as the playwright and Heather Prete as the star, here named Kitty. As Richard Zoglin noted in his TIME review, the characters surrounding Kitty "romanticize her fragility ('She's been stepping on broken glass since she could walk') ... and lament the burden of fame ('Everyone wants something from her; we're no exceptions')." But it's another exercise in rancor, 40 years after the first one.