Jason Miller was an American playwright and film actor who won a Pulitzer Prize for his play That Championship Season and was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in The Exorcist. His early comedies were met with mixed reviews, but That Championship Season was a huge success and won him both a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award. After that, he became a Hollywood actor and didn’t write another play for over two decades. He died in 2001 at the age of 62.
Jason Miller was an American playwright and film actor. He was born in New York in 1939 and died in 2001 at the age of 62. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his play, That Championship Season, and was later nominated for an Academy Award for his role in The Exorcist.
Jason Miller was born into a working class family and attended the University of Scranton for college. He began writing plays in the late 1960s, with Nobody Hears a Broken Drum, and the one-act plays Lou Gehrig Didn’t Die of Cancer, Lady of the Circus and It’s a Shame to Tell a Lie. His comedies focus on very human experiences, looking at the often somewhat grotesque people and the situations they find themselves in. Ultimately, they are about interpersonal connection, friendship, and the overall beauty of the human experience.
His early comedies were met with little fanfare. His three one-act plays were produced as a triple performance at the Triangle Theater in 1967, to mixed reviews. Nobody Hears a Broken Drum was produced at the Fortune Theater in 1970, to slightly better reviews. Then, almost out of nowhere, Jason Miller wrote That Championship Season, which premiered at the New York Shakespeare Festival and Estelle Newman Theater in 1972.
That season of the championship was an instant success: After an Off-Broadway run for more than 140 performances, it transferred to Broadway’s Booth Theater. There, Jason Miller saw his second full show for nearly 850 more performances and launched him into the spotlight. Jason Miller won both a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for comedy, and became a well-respected playwright practically overnight.
That championship season takes place in Scranton, Pennsylvania, one of the places Jason Miller lived in his youth. The scene takes place around a dying coach, on the twentieth anniversary of his old team’s victory at the state championships. Some of his former team members came to him to celebrate and see him one last time before he dies. The comedy offers a funny and heartwarming look at a rough-and-tumble American small town, with critics praising the believability of the characters and dialogue.
After that championship season, Jason Miller didn’t write another play for more than two decades, until his 2000 one-man comedy, Barrymore’s Ghost. Instead, Jason Miller became a Hollywood actor, most famously appearing as the priest in the 1973 film The Exorcist. He appeared in about twenty films before his death, mostly in fairly minor roles. He has also performed on stage intermittently, most notably in a revival of The Odd Couple, where he played the role of Oscar.
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