Jane Miller, Actress, Dies at 64

Working on telling stories through different media, like this, an obituary.

Jane Miller, the well-known British stage actress, whose life was riddled with tragedy, was found dead in her New York residence yesterday. She was 64.

"It is too early to say with any certainty," said spokesman Jason Scott of the New York police department yesterday, "but evidence at the scene strongly suggests that Ms. Miller took her own life." When asked whether a suicide note had been found on the scene, he declined to comment.

Jane Miller was born in London, England to Andrew and Celia Miller on March 3rd, 1933. A shy and withdrawn child according to relatives, she grew up in a poor household, a background the actress was always reluctant to discuss. In her 1956 interview with Time Magazine, one of the few occasions where she discussed it, she merely said: "There wasn't always enough to eat. It toughened me up." Ms. Miller started working her first job at 14, attempting to help her family. She found a job at a small bookstore in London's East End, which was to become her place of discovery.

When Constantine Grey, the Olivier-award winning West End director, known for his unorthodox stagings of traditional plays such as The Imaginary Invalid, Mother Courage and Her Children, Oresteia and a number of Shakespearean plays, one day strode into her place of employment, took one look at her and promptly offered her a major part in a play, Miller thought it was a joke. "I had never even heard of the man," she recalled in an interview with the Telegraph years later. "I thought for sure he was having me on."

However, she did report for rehearsal for George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion on August 16th, 1951, after much prompting from an enthusiastic girlfriend. "My arrival caused quite the stir, I'll tell you that," she told the newspaper. Grey, though known for his daring casting choices, was openly criticized by colleagues and rivals alike for his choice for Eliza Doolittle. Many felt that several more experienced actresses had been unfairly passed by in favor of an inexperienced bookshop clerk with no theater experience at all. One of Grey's producers, Russell Smith, told BBC Radio One: "I thought he'd lost his marbles." Rumors reached the tabloids that the unexpected casting was simply a drunken bet made by Grey, though this was never confirmed. Yet others voiced concerns about Miller's East London background, as Constantine Grey was often known to frequent brothels and pubs in the area, even though no such shady evidence of Miller's past ever came to light. Grey was unperturbed, however. "I'll make the girl a star," he said at a press conference. "And that's that."

Pygmalion, despite the misgivings of the theater community, opened to rave reviews in December 1951, and subsequently ran for 511 performances. The play tells the story of professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins, who makes a bet that he can make Eliza Doolittle, played by Miller, change from poor Cockney flower girl to a girl of manners who can pass for a duchess at an ambassador's party, all in six months. When released in 1912, it was a sharp commentary on the  British class system and women's independence. Miller's portrayal of Ms. Doolittle was praised by critics as "awkward and heartwarming", and "a fresh breath of life into a classic play". Her own experience in it, however, was less than satisfactory. "I was so young," she said in the 1956 Time interview. "I hadn't yet learned the ways of show business. Mr. Grey seemed to have such high hopes for me, said he'd help me make it, but when the show closed, he simply threw me aside, he had no further use for me. Throughout the experience, I didn't really know what I was doing, and yet, when that happened, I finally thought I must know what Eliza felt like." Though Constantine Grey continued to be a leading director in the West End, Jane Miller never worked with him again.

Even though the man who had discovered her had seemingly forgotten all about her, he had managed to push her, if not into stardom, to the beginnings of a long and successful career. In 1953, at the time of her marriage to George Cullum, a teacher 15 years her senior, she was offered a part in the off-Broadway staging of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters, by the then fairly unknown director Iwan J. Turner, who went on to receive three Tony Awards for his work. In the production, Miller played Masha, the middle of three sisters who are members of a rapidly declining Russian upper class who dream of leaving their rural sorrows for happiness in Moscow, a dream that grows ever more faint as the play progresses. Ms. Miller therefore left her new husband in London to go to New York in the summer of 1953. "It was all beginning," she recalled years later. "Acting was something I'd never considered for myself, never dreamed of, and yet I found myself where I needed to be."

The show's short, but critically appraised run was overshadowed, however, by the scandal that hit the tabloids both in London and the US by fall that same year. Miller was by now a fairly well-known figure in the theater world, more due to the fact of her unconventional entry into it, rather than a long-time contribution to the arts. An anonymous source, possibly a colleague of Miller's, revealed that Miller had frequently been seen out and about in New York City in the company of one Manuel Gonzales, a private in the US army, and papers speculated that she was in fact having an affair, though this was never confirmed by Miller, or Gonzales. After the show's limited run, Miller went back to London and her husband, seeking new theatrical projects. Miller and Cullum however, were divorced by May 1955, which some journalists have suggested supports the rumors of an extramarital affair on Miller's part.

Miller then proceeded to play Helena in Joel Wilson's A Midsummer Night's Dream, also in the West End, a role that one critic described as "a credible look at the wisdom of love and human nature". When the play premiered in April 1954, Miller and George Cullum had apparently already started divorce proceedings, but for some reason, the split was not finalized until the following year.

In the wings of A Midsummer Night's Dream, however, Miller had her fair share of romantic drama, and to her and her cast mates' dismay, this took away much of the public's focus on the play. In May 1954, the London newspaper the Mirror ran a story about a young salesman, Ben Foster, who claimed to be Miller's lover. He described in great detail the lovers' romantic weekend getaways and secret rendevouz that had allegedly been going on for the last year. A week after the first story, the tabloid ran another - about a hotel receptionist, Anthony Jones, who in angry terms claimed that in fact he was Miller's secret lover. When asked about the articles in a later interview, Miller claimed she didn't know either man, and the episodes were deemed to be nothing more than the infatuation of two stage door Johnnies in their admiration for a star of the stage.

In the fall of 1954, when her director on Three Sisters, Iwan J. Turner, approached her in relation to another of Chekhov's great plays, The Cherry Orchard, Miller moved to New York for good. Apparently due to her extravagant way of living, she had, shortly previous to the move in September 1954, been evicted from her London apartment, so the work couldn't have come at a better time. In the play, which details an aristocratic family's upheaval and imminent poverty shortly before the Russian revolution at the start of the century, Miller played Varya, the older spinster daughter whose best efforts fail to hold the family together. It opened on Broadway to mixed reviews, but Miller's portrayal of Varya was praised by all. The New York Times critic called her acting "excellent, in particular in the proposal scene between Varya and her reluctant suitor Lopakhin, a scene whose complexity scholars fail to penetrate. I think Jane Miller and Adrian Fisher-LaFleur (her co-star) might have succeeded". When interviewed by Playbill Magazine on her acting techniques and the difficulty of the part, she merely stated, in her by then well-known curt manner: "I'm not acting." What she meant by this, is unclear.

Miller, however, did not complete the play's run, but to many a theatergoer's disappointment, left the production about halfway through its run, and her understudy, Rose Dawlish, took over the part. Ticket sales dwindled, but the reasons behind her departure were never disclosed to the press. Adrian Fisher-LaFleur departed the production too, shortly after.

Following The Cherry Orchard, Miller wasn't seen in public for several years, and became something of a Holy Grail for paparazzi photographers, as she isolated herself in her upstate New York vacation home, which was later to become her permanent residence.

When she re-emerged, however, it was as a greater actress than ever before. Theater historian Jennifer Wheeler speculated in her book Jane Miller: An Unauthorized Biography, which was published in 1995, why this was so. “Even though the unfathomable concept of talent is something that definitely has a hand in the making of a great actor, it is equally true that experience and training are as important, if not more so, in the shaping of a true artist. Did Jane study Stanislavsky during those lonely years? Did she employ a private tutor at Rosewood House (her NY estate)? Perhaps we shall never know.”

What we do know, however, is that for her next appearance on a Broadway stage, as Lavinia Mannon in a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra in 1961, her deep-felt and genuine performance garnered her a Tony Award. The play is a retelling of the Greek tragedyOresteia by Aeschylus, and like its ancient counterpart, it features murder, adultery, love and revenge, but unlike the Oresteia, in which the characters are wholly ruled by their all-powerful fates, Mourning Becomes Electra has a larger amount of psychological reasoning, and can be viewed from a Freudian perspective.

At the Tony Award ceremony, however, though her fans and colleagues praised her performance (fellow actress Olivia Tepper, who was presenting, called it “the most heart-rending performance of the decade”), Miller, in her speech, perhaps the shortest in Tony history, merely said: “I don’t deserve this. But thank you,” and left the stage. Jennifer Wheeler, among many other writers and journalists, have attributed Miller’s Tony speech to her possibly unstable state of mind at the time. Her aging father, who had been ailing for some time, had moved into Miller’s home in the fall of 1961. His rapidly deteriorating health, and her determination to care for him, even employing a live-in nurse, but also juggling her career, must have taken its toll on the actress.

During the years away from the stage, Miller had begun a romance with Robert Sinclair, the famous blues singer, and according to Wheeler’s biography, they’d gotten engaged in secret, a story that cannot be corroborated, as Wheeler's work has been highly criticized for lack of source material. According to Wheeler, Miller broke off the engagement to care for her father.

What must have been equally distressing was her mother’s very public attack on her daughter through the media around this time. In an interview, Celia Miller accused her daughter of conspiring against her, under the tabloid headline "She Wants to Take My Place", though what the actress was allegedly guilty of having done, was never definitely expressed by Mrs. Miller. Though no doubt a trying experience for Jane, owing to the many intangible statements of the much re-printed and referenced interview ("she is plotting my downfall", and "Jane has always been jealous of my beauty and talent"), her fans were quick to rally around her. As one theatergoer put it to Playbill Magazine at the Booth Theatre on opening night for Mourning Becomes Electra: "We, her loyal fans, know better than to believe the half-formed accusations of a trivial Cockney housewife".

Miller never made any sort of counter-argument against her mother, at least not through the media, but they must have been on speaking terms in the winter of 1961-62, when Miller's father lay dying. Celia Miller stayed with her daughter Jane for several weeks in February 1962, until her father's death on March 2nd. Miller's housekeeper later spoke of violent arguments between mother and daughter in the days after the death of Andrew Miller, and Celia went back to London shortly after.

Mother and daughter sadly never got the opportunity to resolve their differences. Celia Miller was found dead in her East End apartment on the morning of May 24th, 1962, by drug overdose. Her death was ruled a suicide.

Though loosing both her parents in a very short space of time, Jane Miller didn't seem to be one to dwell. In June 1962, she spontaneously married blues singer Robert Sinclair on an impromptu outing to New York City, with an usher and a ticket lady as witnesses, commandeered from the Netherlander Theatre on Broadway. Following the wedding, the couple honeymooned in Florida, and Miller also took six months off from her career, despite numerous offers, among them to play Ophelia in Hamlet, directed by Kenneth Bolger, to, as she told the press: "Recuperate after my father's long illness and death, and to enjoy my new husband".

Miller returned to the stage in spring 1963, to rehearse for Karen Orlando's production of My Cousin Rachel Off-Broadway, in which she starred as the story's anti-heroine, the beautiful and seductive Rachel Ashley, who arrives as a new widow at the estate of her late husband's relatives, where she seemingly manipulates her way into the good graces of her cousin Philip. The play, adapted by Diana Morgan from Daphne DuMaurier's novel of the same name, leaves the reader uncertain of the leading lady's motives: Did she plot her late husband's murder? Is she really in love with Philip, or just after his money?

The play is deemed a controversial one, as it ends without giving any straight answers to any of these questions. As critic Jeanine James put it in the New York Times: "You either love it, or you hate it. There's no in-between." Though less unanimous about the nature of the play, Miller's work was yet again praised, as critics marveled in her versatility on the stage.

Tragedy struck, however, on June 30th, about a month into the run of My Cousin Rachel. Miller's husband, Robert Sinclair, was rushed to hospital with acute stomach pains. He died the following day. A spokesperson representing Ms. Miller told the press that doctors were unable to discover the cause of his sudden illness. The post mortem later revealed large quantities of arsenic in Sinclair's stomach. No one, including Miller, could shed any light on how it had entered his system. Though devastated by the sudden passing of her husband, Miller completed the run of My Cousin Rachel, which closed in September 1963.

Then, however, she took another break from her career, and her public life, which was to become one of many such isolating periods of her life. The last photos taken of her before this time shows her running errands on the streets of New York, looking increasingly tired and aggrieved.

She abandoned her Manhattan flat for her upstate vacation home in December of that year, bringing with her a few celebrity friends to live with her, among them fellow actress and co-star of The Cherry Orchard Rita Baker, the jazz singer Angela Scott-Porter, television actor Jay McDonald, known from the hit comedy In the Same Boat, Steven Chase, the stand-up comedian, as well as a childhood friend from London, Jeremy Conlee. In Wheeler's biography of Miller, Rita Baker is interviewed, saying: "We created our own little Bohemian residence there in the country. It was a truly wonderful time."

The friends lived together for about three years on Miller's estate. Jennifer Wheeler writes: "Her friends going to and fro, commuting to work in the city, Chase and McDonald flying out to Los Angeles for long periods of time, Miller was still very much secluded, her only constant companion being Conlee, whom she seems to have supported through the years they lived together." Rita Baker is quoted in Wheeler's book: "Jane needed a break from the world. The distress of losing both her parents over such a short space of time, and then her husband... It was too much to bear. She felt like everyone around her was dying. She needed time to get back on her feet, with the support of her good friends."

Not much else is known about this period in Miller's life. The little we learn about it is from her friends, as she herself upheld her private manner even as she returned to society, and rarely appeared in public between fall 1963 and summer 1966.

In 1966, however, encouraged by her resident friends, but especially with the fierce support of Angela Scott-Porter, Miller tentatively made her way back into the theater community as she accepted an offer to play Karen Wright in Lillian Hellman's play The Children's Hour. Directed by up-and-coming director Anthony Cantor, the 1934 play tells the story of two women running a school, who are accused of being lesbians by a pupil trying to get out of trouble. The play details the unraveling of their lives, the subsequent trial, and the admission of truth by one of the women, Martha, played by Harlean Rogers, whose character, overcome with guilt and rejection, shoots herself in the last scene of the play.

Miller started rehearsals for The Children's Hour in June 1966, often with Angela Scott-Porter's presence in the rehearsal room, and later in the theater, upon Miller's insistence. The revival premiered on Broadway on October 20th. As fate would have it, it ran no more than 17 performances.

Singer Angela Scott-Porter was found dead by her sister Cara Scott-Porter on November 4th, 1966, in the apartment the sisters technically still shared (though Angela only rarely spent time there in the years before her death) on New York City's Upper East Side. The New York City Police Department found the injuries to her body to be self-inflicted. 

Jane Miller, devastated by the sudden, violent loss of another loved one, resigned from The Children's Hour, making the production come to a sudden halt four months earlier than initially planned. Miller then committed herself to a private hospital, where she remained for the next three months.

In May, 1967, Miller went home to London, accompanied by Jeremy Conlee, for the first time in many years, to start rehearsals for The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, having been talked into taking the job by the actor James Lopez, who played against her in A Midsummer Night's Dream, who had now accepted a part in The Homecoming, and wished Miller to play his wife. Directed by Adam Coleman, the play had a limited West End run from October to December, 1967. Miller, draped in furs at a pre-opening press conference said: "It's delightful to be back in old haunts. The brothels never looked so good," no doubt making av wry reference to the rumor mill associated with director Constantine Grey at the start of her West End career.

Miller's career, which had so far exclusively been focused on plays, now took an unexpected turn. Still living in London and getting re-acquainted with its theater community, she auditioned for, and got, the part of Nellie Lovett in the horror musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. The unorthodox subject matter tells the story of a London barber and his accomplice, who, desperate to take revenge on a world that has wronged them, kill their customers and have them baked in pies. Though dealing with a grisly topic, the show is revered for successfully toeing the fine line between humor and tragedy.

Miller had no prior song or dance training to speak of, and the casting was controversial at best. Playing against Aaron Holmes' far more experienced Sweeney Todd, it was generally agreed among critics that the musical was a doomed flop, and Miller's lacking experience a contributing factor.

In the end, Sweeney Todd played only 25 performances, closing prematurely in June 1968, not only due to failing ticket sales, but also because Miller was struck with a serious bout of food poisoning, and had to be taken to hospital on June 11th. In the end, Sweeney was the only musical in which Miller ever starred.

Miller and Conlee now made the move back to New York, and gathered their friends about them once again in upstate New York. Jay McDonald, Rita Baker and Steven Chase were often spotted on the estate, as well as a couple of new additions: Carpathia Hunt and Christopher Doyle - the first a Broadway producer, the latter, a costume designer.

Many lavish parties were held on the estate during the latter part of 1968, through 1969, and the rest of the show business community got a long-awaited look into the life of the hitherto very private and reclusive stage diva, Jane Miller. "The champagne flowed," writes Jennifer Wheeler in her book. "There were loud garden parties and live music, and Jane was the very center of attention, which she surprisingly seemed to relish in. However, there was a state of dusty shabbiness to Rosewood House, of neglect and disrepair." Ever more evident too, became Miller's alcohol addiction, that, as Rita Baker is quoted saying in Wheeler's book, "greatly worried us all".

She seemed to pull herself together, however, at the prospect of playing Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer Prize-winning play A Streetcar Named Desire. It premiered in February 1970, and despite gradually slipping back into alcoholism as the play neared the end of its run in October, her performance earned her a second Tony Award. At the cast party marking the end of the run however, cast members found Miller to be acting oddly throughout the evening, and at the end of the night, she experienced what colleagues described to Playbill Magazine as "a complete nervous breakdown". She was taken to hospital, and later referred to Belleview, the NY mental institution.

Jane checked herself out after two weeks, heading back to Rosewood House and her friends. Still struggling with alcohol abuse, and, according to Rita Baker, substance abuse, she nevertheless accepted an offer to play Mary Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night during the winter of 1971. The play ran a short but successful run Off-Broadway, under the direction of Iwan J. Turner.

Miller now went into the longest period of seclusion of her life, stretching over two decades. Not many details are known about this time of her life, except that she started a romantic relationship with her lifelong friend, Jeremy Conlee. Living in Miller's vacation home, they still received visits from their friends, though with the exception of designer Christopher Doyle, no one stayed for any large amount of time, as several of them, including Rita Baker, were at this point pursuing their careers in other cities.

Over the first year or so, paparazzi swarmed outside the estate with their cameras, hoping to catch a glimpse of the rapidly fading star, a pursuit made much more difficult by the erection of a 12 ft fence around the house in 1972.

The interest in the actress faded over the years however, and the media had pretty much forgotten about her, when she finally burst back into the theater community in January of this year, as star and producer of a new show. "I want to make my final farewell with the stage," she said to The New York Times. "End my career on my own terms, in a play I've dreamed of acting in for many years now." The play was a revival of Macbeth, where Miller played Lady Macbeth, directed by Anthony Cantor, whom Miller herself chose for the job. Miller's performance will be remembered for years to come as one of the greatest Shakespearean interpretations of the twentieth century by the lucky few who saw it.

Two weeks ago, on April 1st, police received a panicked 911 call from a woman, later found to be Miller, in upstate New York, reporting a death and requesting police assistance. When police arrived on the scene, Christopher Doyle, 55, was found brutally stabbed in an upstairs bedroom, and pronounced dead. Both Jane Miller and Jeremy Conlee were taken in for questioning. Conlee was shortly afterwards charged with the murder of Doyle.

Despite her stormy and turbulent life, Jane Miller will be fondly remembered by theater colleagues and audiences alike, as an actress who made a profound impact with her deep-felt and innovative interpretations of many a conventional play. In the words of Jennifer Wheeler in the afterword of her biography: "I thought I knew these stories, the characters, their motivations... Jane Miller showed me how wrong I was."

The trial of Jeremy Conlee is set for June 3rd.

Note: Shortly before the publication of this article, Broadway Buzz has reported, quoting an anonymous source, that a suicide note was in fact found by the body of Jane Miller, allegedly stating: "It wasn't supposed to go this way." This has yet to be confirmed by police.

Author's Note

The story doesn't give any answers, but follow the hidden clues, that's the secret to this seemingly mundane obituary.

Reviews

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