Arthur Miller opens up about marriage to Marilyn Monroe in newly released documentary | Arthur Miller

He was one of the great actors of the 20th century and one of the greatest actors. In newly unearthed footage from nearly thirty years ago, Arthur Miller revealed his brief marriage to Marilyn Monroesaying that she wanted a man who was a “father, lover, friend and supporter,” and the child she longed for would be “another problem”.

Speaking to his friend and biographer Prof Christopher Bigsby, Miller said he felt “death was always on his (Monroe’s) shoulder”. He believed that if he “doesn’t take care of his life” he will be in “a terrible end”.

“At one point I brought the doctors to inject him because he had swallowed things (drugs) to kill him,” he said. So I felt that he was very weak mentally.

Monroe’s death from alcoholism in 1962, at the age of 36, seemed inevitable to her. He said: “It was impossible for him to live, let alone anyone.” “You couldn’t go on with that intensity of life, with that medicine, and still live,” he said.

The couple began dating in 1955 and married in 1956. Miller said it took her several months to realize she had made a mistake. “I didn’t really prepare what I needed to prepare, which was that she didn’t have the inner stuff… She needed a father, a lover, a friend, a helper, above all someone who can’t blame her for anything, otherwise she will lose her confidence. I don’t know if that person exists.”

After Monroe’s miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy, the couple sought medical help without success, the filings show. Reflecting on their death, Miller said that he thought that Monroe wanted to be a mother “in a good way”, while working “in a very difficult situation” in Hollywood: “In a way, I’m not sure how good it would have been for her to have a child. It would have been another problem …

He described Monroe as “a joy to be with” and “a very intelligent woman” who had a “horrible, shy and generous sense of humor”, but “a kind of paranoia” took over. “He began to suspect everyone of taking advantage of him or harming him.”

The couple fell apart when Monroe starred in The Misfits, a film Miller wrote for her, in 1960. They started arguing a few months after their marriage, when Monroe was filming Prince and Showgirl: “We started arguing if (the director, Laurence) Olivier was abusing her…other ways would have been necessary.”

When he left the Misfits, his marriage ended, he said. “We didn’t talk, there was no way for me to talk to him…

Looking at work, he noted that they had spent four years of their marriage “doing nothing”, apart from The Misfits, and that even if Monroe’s attitude had changed, he would have ended the marriage. I couldn’t go on, it would kill me, I wouldn’t be able to work anymore.

The previously unpublished conversations were recorded over a period of nearly 30 years, beginning when Miller first met Bigsby in the mid-1970s and continuing until several years before the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s death in 2005. They came to light after Bigsby, now 84, transcribed them into a book, The Arthur Miller Tapes: A Life in His Own Wordspublished Thursday by Cambridge University Press.

Miller also revealed how the incredible success of Death of a Salesman in 1949 – the first play in American theater to win the Critics’ Circle, Tony and Pulitzer prizes – simultaneously gave him strength and helped end his first marriage to Mary Slattery. “My focus suddenly opened up in different ways to show my control. I felt like I could do anything, and we kind of fell apart at that point, I think.”

He told Bigsby that fame “is a kind of power that is sex, or sex openly”. He said that he was “completely immersed” in his work, “all day and all night”. “Now when I look back, I don’t know how anyone would have been with me.”

At the same time, throughout his life, he doubted his ability to write, he admitted. “All my life I have struggled with self-doubt.” Only “a small percentage” of what he wrote “ever saw the light of day,” he revealed.

Miller also spoke about his flirtation with communism and Hollywood’s suppression of his work when he refused to name communist writers before the UN-American Activities Committee in 1956.

He said McCarthyism created “a kind of irrational feeling of extreme fear that some invisible force has entered society, which was busy boring holes in it, to bring it down.”

He fears that he and “disaffected people” could end up “in insane asylums or some other form of fascism”, restraining themselves while “patriots run the gamut”. “That was one of the reasons I started writing The Crucible. I had to find a solution to (this),” he said.

He started the play during the Salem witch trials because “it was impossible to discuss what was happening to us today. There had to be a distance given to the events.

Miller also spoke on tape about his upbringing, first sex in a brothel at age 16, his views on Zionism and antisemitism as an atheist Jew, his inspiration for The Misfits and many of his plays, the impact of the Holocaust on his work, and his 40-year marriage to his third wife, Inge Morath.

Bigsby, who is professor emeritus of American studies at the University of East Anglia, thinks that the ideas and events that shaped Miller’s life and work made his plays still relevant today. “He talks about Judaism (as) a clear, continuing concern with the weakness of humanity, which he learned from the Depression and he also learned from the Holocaust, that we are walking on very thin ice because of our civilization,” he said. “All of this is very important to Miller.