Fade to Black: A Book of Movie Obituaries

by Paul Donnelley

  CAUSE: She died in Los Angeles, California, from lung cancer. She was 80 years old.

  Arthur Miller

  Born October 17, 1915

  Died February 10, 2005

  Mr Marilyn Monroe. In the world of the theatre Arthur Miller is regarded as probably the best American playwright of the twentieth century but outside he is best known as Marilyn Monroe’s third husband. Arthur Asher Miller was born in New York City at 5.12am on October 17, 1915 and came of age in the Depression of the thirties. After his father (d. Long Island, New York, 1966) Isidore’s women’s coats factory collapsed Arthur Miller worked in a variety of jobs before studying journalism at Michigan University in 1934. He began trying his hand at writing plays and discovered a talent. His first Broadway play, The Man Who Had All The Luck, opened at the Forrest Theater in New York on November 23, 1944. His first major success came three years later with All My Sons (which opened at the Coronet Theater, January 29, 1947), an exposé of war profiteering and individual guilt. His next play, Death Of A Salesman (opened on February 10, 1949), a drama about salesman Willy Loman’s refusal to face the failure of his career and relationships, won the Pulitzer Prize. It was seen in London in 1949 with Paul Muni in the leading role. In 2003 Death Of A Salesman was voted the Play of the Century in a National Theatre poll. In early Fifties America the mere suspicion of left-wing sympathies could wreck a life, never mind a career. In 1953 Miller produced The Crucible about the witch trials of seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts. Many saw it as an allegorical attack on the McCarthyite “witch hunts” then prevalent in the USA. Along with many other writers Miller was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. On June 1, 1957, Miller was convicted of contempt of Congress for his refusal to identify writers believed to hold Communist sympathies. By this time Miller was dating Marilyn Monroe and he later recalled, “The day before I was to appear before the committee the chairman said that if Marilyn Monroe would take a photo with him he would cancel the hearing.” Miller refused to use his girlfriend, who had formed Marilyn Monroe Productions in December 1954 in order to make her own films. Miller was not wasteful of his time and wrote two one-act plays, A View From The Bridge and A Memory Of Two Mondays, in 1955. The following year he rewrote Death Of A Salesman as a three-act play. At 7.21pm on June 29, 1956 in a civil ceremony in White Plains Court House, New York, that lasted four minutes Miller married Monroe and had a Jewish celebration on July 1 at the home of Miller’s agent in Katonah, New York. Later in the summer of 1956 she and Miller travelled to London to film The Prince And The Showgirl which was to be the only film made by the company. The relationship – dubbed The Hourglass and The Egghead – was stormy. Marilyn suffered a miscarriage and Miller found himself unable to cope with his wife’s erratic behaviour. He had written a short story for Esquire about cowboys which he developed into a film. Made by Seven Artists it was the final nail in his marriage. In November 1960 Marilyn’s co-star Clark Gable died of a heart attack and on January 20, 1961 Miller and Monroe were divorced. In 1963 Miller upset Monroe fans by writing After The Fall, a thinly disguised retelling of his marriage woes. It opened on January 22, 1964. Miller disingenuously claimed that Maggie in the story was not Monroe and in a sense he told the truth. Maggie was based on Norma Jeane Mortenson. His next plays included: Incident At Vichy (opened December 3, 1964), The Price (opened February 7, 1968), The Archbishop’s Ceiling (opened April 30, 1977), The American Clock (opened November 20, 1980), The Ride Down Mount Morgan (opened October 11, 1991) and Mr Peter’s Connections (opened May 17, 1998). Miller married the Roman Catholic Mary Grace Slattery on August 5, 1940, and by her had two children: Jane Ellen (b. Brooklyn, New York, September 7, 1944) and Robert Arthur (b. May 31, 1947). They divorced on June 11, 1956 in Reno, Nevada. On February 17, 1962, four months before the death of Monroe, 6́ 1˝ Miller married the Magnum photographer Inge Morath (b. Graz, Austria, May 27, 1923). They had a daughter, Rebecca Augusta (b. Roxbury, Connecticut, August 7, 1963), who became an actor and married Daniel Day-Lewis. They also had a son, Daniel (b. Roxbury, Connecticut, September 15, 1962), who was afflicted by Down’s syndrome and put in a home, Southbury Training School in Woodbury, ten miles from the Miller homestead. Miller never acknowledged his son or visited him although Inge Morath was a weekly visitor until her death from cancer in New York on January 30, 2002. In December 2004, Miller announced that he had been living with 34-year-old artist Agnes Barley since 2002. Miller was to declare, “In all my plays and books I try to take settings and dramatic situations from real life, which involve real questions of right and wrong.”

  CAUSE: Suffering from cancer, heart problems and pneumonia Miller was cared for at his New York home by his sister Joan Copeland. On February 8, 2005, he made the two-hour journey to his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, where he died 48 hours later aged 89 of congenital heart failure. Rebecca Day-Lewis was at his bedside.

  FURTHER READING: Miller The Playwright (3rd edition) – Dennis Welland (London: Methuen, 1985); Time Bends A Life– Arthur Miller (London: Methuen, 1987); Arthur Miller A Life– Martin Gottfried (London: Faber & Faber, 2003).

  Max Miller

  (THOMAS HENRY SARGENT)

  Born November 21, 1894

  Died May 7, 1963

  ‘The Cheeky Chappie’. Born at 43 Hereford Street, Brighton, East Sussex, the son of a labourer, Max Miller was a music hall comedian who shone with his risqué routines culled from his famous ‘Blue Book’ and loud attire. Over (6)߰tall, he kept audiences in stitches by letting them use their imaginations rather than being downright rude. He made 13 feature films: The Good Companions (1933) as Millbrau, Friday The Thirteenth (1933) as Joe, Princess Charming (1934) as Chuff, Things Are Looking Up (1935) as Joey, Get Off My Foot (1935) as Herbert Cronk, the title role in Educated Evans (1936) as Educated Evans, Don’t Get Me Wrong (1937) as Wellington Lincoln, Take It From Me (1937) as Albert Hall, Thank Evans (1938) reprising his part as Educated Evans, Everything Happens To Me (1938) as Charles Cromwell, Hoots Mon! (1939) as Harry Hawkins, The Good Old Days (1939) as Alexander the Greatest and Asking For Trouble (1942) as Dick Smith. The character of Archie Rice in John Osborne’s The Entertainer was based on Miller.

  CAUSE: On September 14, 1959, he suffered a coronary thrombosis that ultimately forced his retirement. In July 1962 he was felled by a heart attack. He died in Brighton at 11.57pm on May 7, 1963. Considering his deserved reputation as a skinflint, it came as a surprise to many when his estate was valued at just £27,877.

  FURTHER READING: Max Miller: The Cheeky Chappie– John M. East (London: Robson Books, 1993).

  Spike Milligan, KBE(Hon)

  Born April 16, 1918

  Died February 27, 2002

  Sincere Goon. Terence Alan Milligan was born at 3.30pm in Ahmednagar Military Hospital, India. 5́ 11˝ Spike Milligan was the son of Leo A. Milligan MSM, RA (d. Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, January 14, 1969), an Irish Captain in the British Raj in India, and Florence Kettleband (b. 1894). He was educated in a tent in the Hyderabad Sindh desert, and then in a series of Roman Catholic schools in India until the family returned to London in 1931. He left school at 15 to work for Stones Engineering in Deptford, but he was sacked because he repeatedly fused the lights. At the outbreak of the Second World War he joined the Royal Artillery, an experience he would draw on in five volumes of comic memoirs, which began with Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall in 1971. In January 1944, he was nearly killed by a mortar bomb near Lauro in the hills to the northeast of Mount Vesuvius. He suffered severe shellshock, started to stammer, and suffered the first of the nervous breakdowns that were to plague him for the rest of his life. Milligan was one of the most original comedians of his age. A prolific output saw him write and star in almost all of the 157 half-hour episodes of The Goon Show, write eight series of his own show Q and more than 50 assorted books of biography, verse, fiction, letters, games and plays. However, such was the intensity with which he held views that he spent much time in
mental hospitals. “I am condemned never to be taken seriously,” he said. Jimmy Grafton, a scriptwriter introduced him to Harry Secombe, who in turn introduced him to Peter Sellers and Michael Bentine. The quartet worked on a radio show that, billed as Those Crazy People, later The Goons, was first broadcast on May 28, 1951. It ran for 11 series. The weekly programme became a national institution. The Prince of Wales later described it as “one of my favourite programmes,” and it lasted for eight years, ending in January 1960. A final performance was given in 1972 to mark the 50th anniversary of the BBC. Characters such as Neddy Seagoon, played by Secombe, Major Bloodnok played by Sellers, and Milligan’s own Eccles became the favourites of a generation. Milligan was a comic with a social conscience. He supported CND and the ban on the slaughter of seal pups. He was a member of the World Wide Fund for Nature and Greenpeace. He was fiercely opposed to pornography and smoking (even though as a young man he smoked like a chimney), and he was a compulsive letter-writer. When he wrote to The Times in 1990 to ask the paper to make sure his obituary was ready (“as I have not been feeling well lately”), he added that his “most recent exploit was trying to save Rye Hospital” ending with “Yours ailing, Spike”. Despite having four children of his own from his three marriages, and two other children, Milligan was obsessed by population growth. When Tony Blair became Prime Minister on May 1, 1997, Milligan wrote to him with a modest proposal to help to remedy the crisis: a ban on births for five years. Spike appeared in the films Rentadick (1972) as a customs officer, Adolf Hitler – My Part In His Downfall (1972) as Leo Milligan (his father), The Three Musketeers (1973) as Monsieur Bonancieux, Digby, The Biggest Dog In The World (1973) as Dr Harz, Man About The House (1974) as himself, The Last Remake Of Beau Geste (1977) as Crumble, Life Of Brian (1979) as Spike, History Of The World: Part I (1981) as Monsieur Rimbaud and Yellowbeard (1983) as a flunkie. He also wrote the segment “Sloth” in The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins (1971). On January 26, 1952, he married June Marlowe and had three children, Laura (b. Royal Northern Hospital, Holloway Road, London, November 2, 1952), Sean (b. September 19, 1954) and Silé (b. December 2, 1956). They divorced in 1960. In the Church of Our Lady of Good Counsel in Rawdon, Yorkshire, on April 28, 1962 he married Patricia ‘Paddy’ Margaret Ridgeway (d. 1978 of cancer) and they had a daughter (Jane) on May 17, 1966. In July 1983, he married Shelagh Sinclair (b. 1945). Spike had a daughter (Romany) by a Canadian journalist in 1975 and a son (James) after an affair with Margaret Maughan in 1975.

  CAUSE: He died in Rye, East Sussex, aged 83, from liver disease. On June 24, 2002, a service of thanksgiving for his life and work was held at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, London. The Rev Nicholas Holtam officiated and Stephen Fry read the lesson. Sir Stephen Lamport represented the Prince of Wales. Joanna Lumley read My Boyhood Dog by Spike Milligan, Peter O’Toole read Sonnet XXX by William Shakespeare and Eddie Izzard read Have A Nice Day! by Spike Milligan. Eric Sykes gave an address.

  FURTHER READING: Spike Milligan A Biography – Pauline Scudamore (London: Grafton, 1987).

  Mary Millington

  (MARY RUTH QUILTER)

  Born November 30, 1945

  Died August 19, 1979

  Abused and used porn star. To the outside world the tiny, illegitimate, Middlesex-born Mary Millington had much in her favour. A determined and avowed supporter of sexual liberation, she practised what she preached and appeared with gay abandon in several blue films under the name Mary Maxted, including Eskimo Nell (1975), Erotic Inferno (1975) as Jane, Keep It Up Downstairs (1976) as Polly, Intimate Games (1976), I Lust Och Nöd (1976) and I’m Not Feeling Myself Tonight (1976). In 1977, diminutive porn baron David Sullivan moved into film production with Come Play With Me. Costing £83,000 to make, the film generated over £3 million in revenue. The star of the film was Mary, playing a character called Sue. When she began working for Sullivan, he paid for her to have plastic surgery and changed her name to Mary Millington. She went on to appear in What’s Up Superdoc! (1978), The Playbirds (1978) as Lucy, Queen Of The Blues (1979) as Mary and Confessions From The David Galaxy Affair (1979) as Millicent Cumming. Millington became Sullivan’s girlfriend but she was emotionally disturbed. She took too many drugs, shoplifted and worked as a prostitute. On a downward spiral, there was just one way out and she took it.

  CAUSE: At the age of 33, Mary Millington committed suicide at her Epsom home. Sullivan claimed he cried for a fortnight when told of her death. However, his grief did not stop him from running a lurid story years later in his tacky Sunday Sport claiming that Millington was the lesbian lover of film star Diana Dors and that she had tried to seduce Dors’ husband, Alan Lake, who (allegedly) hadn’t been able to rise to the occasion. Nor did he withdraw her films from circulation. In fact, Sullivan made a sickening ‘tribute’ film that featured a Millington lookalike lying naked in a coffin. (Later, Sullivan recruited 24-year-old Julie Lee [real name Julie Moxon] to replace Millington in his films and magazines. Lee agreed to marry a wealthy Arab for £1 million but she, too, met with an untimely death. On May 10, 1983, she was killed in a car crash.)