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Richard Widmark established himself as an icon of American cinema with his debut in the 1947 film noir Kiss of Death (1947), in which he won a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination as the killer Tommy Udo. Kiss of Death (1947) and other noir thrillers established Widmark as part of a new generation of American movie actors who became stars in the post-World War II era. With fellow post-War stars Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum, Widmark brought a new kind of character to the screen in his character leads and supporting parts: a hard-boiled type who does not actively court the sympathy of the audience. Widmark was not afraid to play deeply troubled, deeply conflicted, or just downright deeply corrupt characters.

After his debut, Widmark would work steadily until he retired at the age of 76 in 1990, primarily as a character lead. His stardom would peak around the time he played the U.S. prosecutor in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) as the 1950s segued into the 1960s, but he would continue to act for another 30 years.

Richard Weedt Widmark was born in Sunrise Township, Minnesota, to Ethel Mae (Barr) and Carl Henry Widmark. His father was of Swedish descent and his mother of English and Scottish ancestry. He has said that he loved the movies from his boyhood, claiming, "I've been a movie bug since I was 4. My grandmother used to take me". The teenaged Widmark continued to go to the movies and was thrilled by Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931). "I thought Boris Karloff was great", Widmark said. Although he loved the movies and excelled at public speaking while attending high school, Widmark attended Lake Forest College with the idea of becoming a lawyer. However, he won the lead role in a college production of, fittingly enough, the play "Counsellor-at-Law", and the acting bug bit deep. After taking his bachelor of arts degree in 1936, he stayed on at Lake Forest as the Assistant Director of Speech and Drama. However, he soon quit the job and moved to New York to become an actor, and by 1938 he was appearing on radio in "Aunt Jenny's Real Life Stories". He made his Broadway debut in 1943 in the play "Kiss and Tell" and continued to appear on stage in roles that were light-years away from the tough cookies he would play in his early movies.

After World War II, he was signed by 20th Century-Fox to a seven-year contract. After seeing his screen test for the role of Tommy Udo, 20th Century-Fox boss Darryl F. Zanuck insisted that the slight, blonde Widmark - no one's idea of a heavy, particularly after his stage work - be cast as the psychopath in Kiss of Death (1947), which had been prepared as a Victor Mature vehicle. Even though the role was small, Widmark stole the picture. The publicity department at 20th Century-Fox recommended that exhibitors market the film by concentrating on thumping the tub for their new antihero. "Sell Richard Widmark" advised the studio's publicity manual that an alert 20th Century-Fox sent to theater owners. The manual told local exhibitors to engage a job printer to have "wanted" posters featuring Widmark's face printed and pasted up. He won a Golden Globe and an Oscar nod for the part, which led to an early bout with typecasting at the studio. Widmark played psychotics in The Street with No Name (1948) and Road House (1948) and held his own against new Fox superstar Gregory Peck in the William A. Wellman western Yellow Sky (1948), playing the villain, of course. When his pressuring the studio to let him play other parts paid off, his appearance as a sailor in Down to the Sea in Ships (1949) made headlines: Life magazine's March 28, 1949, issue featured a three-page spread of the movie headlined "Widmark the Movie Villain Goes Straight". He was popular, having captured the public imagination, and before the decade was out, his hand- and footprints were immortalized in concrete in the court outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.

The great director Elia Kazan cast Widmark in his thriller Panic in the Streets (1950), not as the heavy (that role went to Jack Palance) but as the physician who tracks down Palance, who has the plague, in tandem with detective Paul Douglas. Widmark was establishing himself as a real presence in the genre that later would be hailed as film noir. Having proved he could handle other roles, Widmark didn't shy away from playing heavies in quality pictures. The soon-to-be-blacklisted director Jules Dassin cast him in one of his greatest roles, as the penny-ante hustler Harry Fabian in Night and the City (1950). Set in London, Widmark's Fabian manages to survive in the jungle of the English demimonde, but is doomed. Widmark was masterful in conveying the desperation of the criminal seeking to control his own fate but who is damned, and this performance also became an icon of film noir. In that same year, he appeared in Oscar-winning writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz's No Way Out (1950) as a bigot who instigates a race riot.

As the 1950s progressed, Widmark played in westerns, military vehicles, and his old stand-by genre, the thriller. He appeared with Marilyn Monroe (this time cast as the psycho) in Don't Bother to Knock (1952) and made Pickup on South Street (1953) that same year for director Samuel Fuller. His seven-year contract at Fox was expiring, and Zanuck, who would not renew the deal, cast him in the western Broken Lance (1954) in a decidedly supporting role, billed beneath not only Spencer Tracy but even Robert Wagner and Jean Peters. The film was well respected, and it won an Oscar nomination for best screenplay for the front of Hollywood 10 blacklistee Albert Maltz. Widmark left Fox for the life of a freelance, forming his own company, Heath Productions. He appeared in more westerns, adventures and social dramas and pushed himself as an actor by taking the thankless role of the Dauphin in Otto Preminger's adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan (1957), a notorious flop that didn't bring anyone any honors, neither Preminger, his leading lady Jean Seberg, nor Widmark. In 1960, he was appearing in another notorious production, John Wayne's ode to suicidal patriotism, The Alamo (1960), with the personally liberal Widmark playing Jim Bowie in support of the very conservative Wayne's Davy Crockett. Along with character actor Chill Wills, Widmark arguably was the best thing in the movie.

In 1961, Widmark acquitted himself quite well as the prosecutor in producer-director Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), appearing with the Oscar-nominated Spencer Tracy and the Oscar-winning Maximilian Schell, as well as with superstar Burt Lancaster and acting genius Montgomery Clift and the legendary Judy Garland (the latter two winning Oscar nods for their small roles). Despite being showcased with all this thespian firepower, Widmark's character proved to be the axis on which the drama turned. A little later, Widmark appeared in two westerns directed by the great John Ford, with co-star James Stewart in Two Rode Together (1961) and as the top star in Ford's apologia for Indian genocide, Cheyenne Autumn (1964). On Two Rode Together (1961), Ford feuded with Jimmy Stewart over his hat. Stewart insisted on wearing the same hat he had for a decade of highly successful westerns that had made him one of the top box office stars of the 1950s. Both he and Widmark were hard-of-hearing (as well as balding and in need of help from the makeup department's wigmakers), so Ford would sit far away from them while directing scenes and then give them directions in a barely audible voice. When neither one of the stars could hear their director, Ford theatrically announced to his crew that after over 40 years in the business, he was reduced to directing two deaf toupees. It was testimony to the stature of both Stewart and Widmark as stars that this was as far as Ford's baiting went, as the great director could be extraordinarily cruel.

Widmark continued to co-star in A-pictures through the 1960s. He capped off the decade with one of his finest performances, as the amoral police detective in Don Siegel's gritty cop melodrama Madigan (1968). With Madigan, one can see Widmark's characters as a progression in the evolution of what would become the late 1960s nihilistic antihero, such as those embodied by Clint Eastwood in Siegel's later Dirty Harry (1971). In the 1970s, he continued to make his mark in movies and, beginning in 1971, in television. In movies, he appeared primarily in supporting roles, albeit in highly billed fashion, in such films as Sidney Lumet's Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Robert Aldrich's Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977), and Stanley Kramer's The Domino Principle (1977). He even came back as a heavy, playing the villainous doctor in Coma (1978).

In 1971, in search of better roles, he turned to television, starring as the President of the U.S. in the TV miniseries Vanished (1971). His performance in the role brought Widmark an Emmy nomination. He resurrected the character of Madigan for NBC in six 90-minute episodes that appeared as part of the rotation of "NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie" for the fall 1972 season. Widmark was married for 55 years to playwright Jean Hazlewood, from 1942 until her death in 1997 (they had one child, Anne, who was born in 1945). He lived quietly and avoided the press, saying in 1971, "I think a performer should do his work and then shut up". Los Angeles Times critic Kevin Thomas thought that Widmark should have won an Oscar nomination for his turn in When the Legends Die (1972) playing a former rodeo star tutoring Frederic Forrest's character.

It is surprising to think that Kiss of Death (1947) represented his sole Oscar nomination, but with the rise of respect for film noir around the time his career began tapering off in the '70s, he began to be reevaluated as an actor. Unlike Bogart, who did not live to see his reputation flourish after his death, Widmark became a cult figure well before he retired.

Arthur Asher Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in New York City, one of three children born to Augusta (nee Barnett) and Isidore Miller. His family was of Austrian Jewish descent. His father manufactured women's coats, but his business was devastated by the Depression, seeding his son's disillusionment with the American Dream and those blue-sky-seeking Americans who pursued it with both eyes focused on the Grail of Materialism. Due to his father's strained financial circumstances, Miller had to work for tuition money to attend the University of Michigan, where he wrote his first plays. They were successful, earning him numerous student awards, including the Avery Hopwood Award in Drama for "No Villain" in 1937.

The award was named after one of the most successful playwrights of the 1920s, who simultaneously had five hits on Broadway, the Neil Simon of his day. Now almost forgotten except for his contribution to Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Hopwood achieved a material success that the older Miller could not match, but he failed to capture the immortality that would be Miller's. Hopwood's suicide, on the beach of the Cote d'Azur, reportedly inspired Norman Maine's march into the southern California surf in A Star Is Born (1937).

Like Fitzgerald, Miller tasted success at a tender age. In 1938, upon graduating from Michigan, he received a Theatre Guild National Award and returned to New York, joining the Federal Theatre Project. He married his college girlfriend, Mary Grace Slattery, in 1940; they would have two children, Joan and Robert. In 1944, he made his Broadway debut with "The Man Who Had All the Luck", a flop that lasted only four performances. He went on to publish two books, "Situation Normal" (1944) and "Focus" (1945), but it was in 1947 that his star became ascendant. His play "All My Sons", directed by Elia Kazan, became a hit on Broadway, running for 328 performances. Both Miller and Kazan received Tony Awards, and Miller won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. It was a taste of what was to come.

Staged by Kazan, "Death of a Salesman" opened at the Morosco Theatre on February 10, 1949, and closed 742 performances later on Nov 18, 1950. The play was the sensation of the season, winning six Tony Awards, including Best Play and Best Author for Miller. Miller also was awarded the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play made lead actor Lee J. Cobb, as Willy Loman, an icon of the stage comparable to the Hamlet of John Barrymore: a synthesis of actor and role that created a legend that survives through the bends of time. A contemporary classic was recognized, though some critics complained that the play wasn't truly a tragedy, as Willy Loman was such a pathetic soul. Given his status, Loman's fall could not qualify as tragedy, as there was so little height from which to fall. Miller, a dedicated progressive and a man of integrity, never accepted that criticism. As Willy's wife Linda said at his funeral, "Attention must be paid", even to the little people.

In 1983, Miller himself directed a staging of "Salesman" in Chinese at the Beijing People's Art Theatre. He said that while the Chinese, then largely ignorant of capitalism, might not have understood Loman's career choice, they did have empathy for his desire to drink from the Grail of the American Dream. They understood this dream, which Miller characterizes as the desire "to excel, to win out over anonymity and meaninglessness, to love and be loved, and above all, perhaps, to count." It is this desire to sup at the table of the great American Capitalists, even if one is just scrounging for crumbs, in a country of which President Calvin Coolidge said, "The business of America is business," this desire to be recognized, to be somebody, that so moves "Salesman" audiences, whether in New York, London or Beijing.

Miller never again attained the critical heights nor smash Broadway success of "Salesman," though he continued to write fine plays that were appreciated by critics and audiences alike for another two decades. Disenchanted with Kazan over his friendly testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the two parted company when Kazan refused to direct "The Crucible", Miller's parable of the witch hunts of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Defending her husband, Kazan's wife, Molly, told Miller that the play was disingenuous, as there were no real witches in Puritan Salem. It was a point Miller disagreed with, as it was a matter of perspective--the witches in Salem were real to those who believed in them. However, subsequent research has shown that the cursorily-researched (at best) play contains fictional motifs (regarding Goodman and Goodwife Putnam and their offspring), limited research, and carelessness in identifying (or not identifying, as with William Stoughton) the true authors of the witch trials. Directed by another Broadway legend, Jed Harris, the play ran for 197 performances and won Miller the 1953 Tony Award for Best Play. Miller had another success with "A View from the Bridge", a play about an incest-minded longshoreman written with overtones of classical Greek tragedy, which ran for 149 performances in the 1955-56 season.

It was in 1956 that Miller made his most fateful personal decision, when he divorced his first wife, Mary Slattery Miller, and married movie siren-cum-legend Marilyn Monroe. With this marriage Miller achieved a different type of fame, a pop culture status he abhorred. It was a marriage doomed to fail, as Monroe was, in Miller's words, "highly self-destructive". In his 1989 autobiography, "Timebends", Miller wrote that a marriage was a conspiracy to keep out the light. When one or more of the partners could no longer prevent the light from coming in and illuminating the other's faults, the marriage was doomed. In his own autobiography, "A Life", Kazan said that he could not understand the marriage. Monroe, who had slept with Kazan on a casual basis, as she did with many other Hollywood players, was the type of woman someone took as a mistress, not as a wife. Miller, however, was a man of principle. He was in love. "[A]ll my energy and attention were devoted to trying to help her solve her problems", Miller confessed to a French newspaper in 1992. "Unfortunately, I didn't have much success."

The conspiracy collapsed during the filming of The Misfits (1961) (1961), with John Huston shooting the original script Miller had written expressly for his wife. The genesis of the story had come to him while waiting out a divorce from his first wife Mary in Nevada. Monroe hated her character Roslyn, claiming Miller had made her out to be the dumb blond stereotype she so loathed and had been trying to escape. Withering in her criticism of Miller, and ultimately unfaithful to him, she and Miller separated. Norman Mailer, in his 1973 biography, "Marilyn", ridiculed Miller for not doing enough to help Monroe. Film critic Pauline Kael lambasted Mailer by imputing petty machismo and jealousy as the cause of his animus against Miller. Miller would later reunite with Kazan to launch the new Lincoln Center Repertory Theater, with the play "After the Fall", a fictionalization of his relationship with Monroe. "Fall" ran for 208 performances in repertory in 1964 and 1965 and won 1964 Tony Awards for Jason Robards and Kazan's future wife Barbara Loden, playing the Miller and Monroe stand-ins Quentin and Maggie. Miller's own "Incident at Vichy" played in repertory with "Fall" in the 1965 season, but lasted only 32 performances.

On June 1, 1957, Miller was found in contempt of Congress for refusing to name names of a literacy circle suspected of Communist Party affiliations. The State Department deprived him of his passport, and he became a left-wing cause célèbre. In 1967 Miller became President of P.E.N., an international literacy organization that campaigned for the rights of suppressed writers. He published a collection of short stories entitled "I Don't Need You Any More", that same year. Returning to the Morosco Theatre, the site of his greatest triumph, "The Price" was Miller's last unqualified hit in America, running for 429 performances between February 7, 1968 and February 15, 1969. Though Miller won a 1968 Tony Award for Best Play, the bulk of his success as an original playwright was over. The Price (1971) (a 1971 teleplay) was nominated for six Emmy awards, including Outstanding Single Program-Drama or Comedy, and won three, including Best Actor for George C. Scott, who would later win a 1976 Tony playing Willy Loman in a 1975 Broadway revival.

Miller never again achieved success on Broadway with an original play. In the 1980s, when he was hailed as the greatest living American playwright after the death of Tennessee Williams, he even had trouble getting full-scale revivals of his work staged. One of his more significant later works, "The American Clock", based on Studs Terkel's oral history of the Great Depression, "Hard Times", ran for only 11 previews and 12 performances in late 1980 at the Biltmore Theatre. Also in 1980, Miller courted controversy by backing the casting of the outspokenly anti-Zionist Vanessa Redgrave as a concentration-camp Jewess in his teleplay Playing for Time (1980), an adaptation of the memoir "The Musicians of Auschwitz". Despite the fallout in the United States for America's then-greatest living playwright, his works were popular in Great Britain, whose intellectual and theatrical communities treated him as a major figure in world literature. The universality of his work was highlighted with his own successful staging of "Death of a Salesman" in Beijing in 1983.

"Death of a Salesman" has become a standard warhorse, now revived each decade on Broadway, and internationally. In addition to George C. Scott and Lee J. Cobb (who received an Emmy nomination for the 1966 teleplay; Miller himself received a Special Citation from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for the production), Dustin Hoffman and Brian Dennehy have garnered kudos for playing Willie Loman. The 1984 Broadway revival of "Salesman" won a Tony for best Reproduction and helped revive Miller's domestic reputation, while Volker Schlöndorff's 1985 film (Death of a Salesman (1985)) of the production won 10 Emmy nominations, including one for Miller as executive producer of the Outstanding Drama/Comedy Special. Hoffman won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for playing Willy Loman. The 1999 revival won four Tonys, including Dennehy for Best Actor, and ran for 274 performances at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre. Arthur Miller died in Roxbury, Connecticut in 2005, aged 89. He had been suffering from cancer, pneumonia and a heart condition.

Miller based his works on American history, his own life, and his observations of the American scene. His stature is traditionally based on his perceived refusal to avoid moral and social issues in his writing. His willingness to fight for what he believed in his chosen art form made him a literary icon whose name will live on in world letters.

He did his pre college training at George School, Newtown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, then was in a class of 50 at Williams College majoring in music as an undergraduate distinguishing himself by writing a book, lyrics and music for two college shows based on the adaption of 'Beggar on Horseback'. He won the Hutchinson prize to study music composition for 2 years. His first professional writing was in 1953 when he co authored the script for the television series'Topper'. A year later he wrote all the music and lyrics for'Saturday night' . In 1955 he started work on 'West Side Story' and also found time to writ scripts for 'The Last Word' for Columbia Broadcasting and the background music for' The Party Girls of Summer' For the film of 'West Side Story' he created new and powerful lyrics for the 'America' sequence, which is the only major alteration from the Broadway production.

Elizabeth Hubbard was born on 22 December 1933 in New York City, New York, USA. She was an actress, known for As the World Turns (1956), The Doctors (1963) and First Ladies Diaries: Edith Wilson (1976). She was married to David Bennett . She died on 8 April 2023 in Roxbury, Connecticut, USA.

Blonde Lenka Peterson was born Lenka (or Lenke) Isacson in Omaha, where she was raised, the daughter of a Swedish diagnostician, Sven Edward Isacson, and a Hungarian lab tech, Magdalina "Lenke" (Leinweber). She gained her first acting experience in local amateur theatre. Having majored in drama at the University of Iowa, she moved to New York in 1943. As a struggling actress trying to make it to Broadway, she lived in humble lodgings at the Rehearsal Club, a girls' boarding house. Her first paid work ($20 a week) was as a uniformed tour guide at NBC studios. Through an agent she was eventually able to obtain a job as an understudy at a New Hampshire playhouse which led to further acting stints at regional theatres in other states. In 1947, she made her Broadway debut (the first of eleven further appearances) in the play Bathsheba at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. In 1948, she wed Daniel Patrick O'Connor, with whom she would have five children, including actors Glynnis O'Connor and Darren O'Connor.

One of the first members to enrol at New York's Actor's Studio, Lenka was spotted by Elia Kazan who cast her in a small role in his motion picture Panic in the Streets (1950). By 1951, with regular job offers now forthcoming, she commuted between Hollywood and her home base in St. Louis (where her husband was employed in the speech and drama department of the university), now earning $350 a week for acting in early TV anthologies and drama series. Her subsequent career was largely divided between theatre and television. The former culminated in a Tony Award-nominated performance as Best Actress on Broadway for the 1984 musical "Quilters". While success on the stage did not parlay into stardom on screen, she was rarely out of work in that medium. There were recurring roles in several soaps, including Ryan's Hope (1975) and Another World (1964), as well as many guest spots in popular shows like Route 66 (1960), Kojak (1973), Quincy, M.E. (1976), Hill Street Blues (1981) and Law & Order (1990). She also sidelined as an acting teacher at the Metropolitan Opera Studio and was founder of the non-profit Westchester Young Actors Theater in New York.

Tom Cole was born on 8 April 1933 in Paterson, New Jersey, USA. He was a writer, known for Smooth Talk (1985), Streets of Gold (1986) and To Kill the King (1974). He was married to Joyce Chopra. He died on 23 February 2009 in Roxbury, Connecticut, USA.

Tom Doyle was born on 23 March 1928 in Jerry City, Ohio, USA. He was married to Eva Hesse, Natalie Burdette and Jane Miller. He died on 8 October 2016 in Roxbury, Connecticut, USA.

Kate Brinker was born on 29 March 1914 in Seattle, Washington, USA. She was an actress, known for Desert Guns (1936). She was married to Manfred Lee. She died on 11 November 1991 in Roxbury, Connecticut, USA.