Most people are familiar with the cliché regarding family that says “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” In the case of Rebecca Miller, the daughter of famous playwright Arthur Miller and photographer Inge Morath, the cliché proves true.
Miller is an accomplished independent filmmaker, artist, novelist, director, and advocate for women in the film industry. Growing up surrounded by artists in Roxbury, Connecticut, her passion and desire for creativity was likely inevitable. Sculptors Alexander Calder and Philip Grausman, who tutored her, were neighbors, along with choreographer Martha Clarke. At Yale University, where she studied Painting and Literature, feminist author Naomi Wolf was her roommate.
Miller doesn’t consider her upbringing glamorous, however.
“It wasn’t a fancy life and it was very much about work and about decency in a certain way,” she said in The New York Times in 2018. “They were bohemians in a way, but they were also very straight people.”
In addition to her education at Yale, Miller studied Film at The New School. She made non-verbal films, which she exhibited with her paintings and sculptures at the Leo Castelli Gallery and Victoria Munroe Gallery.
In 1995, Miller wrote and directed her first film, “Angela,” which tells the story of a 10-year-old girl’s attempts to purge her soul of sin to cure her mentally ill mother. The film won her the Independent Feature Project (IFP) Gotham Award, the Independent Film Project's Open Palm Award, and the Sundance Film Festival Filmmaker Trophy.
Another project, a collection of prose portraits of women called Personal Velocity, was named The Washington Post Best Book of 2001 and was adapted into a feature film of the same name.
Alongside her other nuanced, sorrowful, and introspective works, like “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” and “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee,” Miller has also showcased her sense of humor with the screwball comedy “Maggie’s Plan.” Vanity Fair critic Richard Lawson called it a “smart, goofy delight.”
In 2017, after collecting footage for more than 20 years, Miller honored her father’s life and work by producing and directing the documentary “Arthur Miller: Writer.”