For those in the UK who subscribe to the Sky Arts channel, Marilyn and Arthur Miller are featured in the latest episode of the documentary series, Artists in Love, tonight at 8pm.
“I’d been disgruntled by this series. Featuring famous partnerships, it had chosen pairings where the man was the genius and the woman merely his muse. Why not tell us about Leigh/Olivier or Plath/Hughes, marriages where the woman does a bit more than wash the dishes and spark up her man’s imagination?
The series corrects that tonight by focusing on the short marriage of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller. When Miller first met the blonde bombshell he immediately saw past her sexual image, saying to her: ‘You’re the saddest girl I’ve ever met.’
And yet, despite seeming a sad ‘girl’ to this intellectual man, he was in awe of her, recalling of this first meeting: ‘I had to flee or walk into a doom beyond all knowing. With all her radiance she was surrounded by a darkness which perplexed me.’ And this impressed Marilyn: he walked away rather than swooning, pawing and patronising her.” – Julie McDowall, The National