Jason Miller, Playwright and Actor, Dies at 62

By ROBIN POGREBIN

Published: May 15, 2001

Jason Miller, the playwright and actor who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for ''That Championship Season,'' died on Sunday in Scranton, Pa. He was 62 and lived in Scranton.

The cause was a heart attack, said Joseph Brennan, the Lackawanna County coroner.

Mr. Miller also won a Tony Award for ''That Championship Season'' and in the same year was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of Father Damien Karras in the horror movie ''The Exorcist.''

''That Championship Season,'' about a reunion of members of a winning basketball team with their coach, set in the Lackawanna Valley, was based on Mr. Miller's experience as a member of the St. Patrick's High School basketball team in the 1950's. The play, directed by A. J. Antoon, who also won a Tony Award for his work, originated at Joseph Papp's Public Theater in 1972 and then moved to the Booth on Broadway. The cast included Charles Durning and Paul Sorvino, who was nominated for a Tony Award for his performance.

Writing in The New York Times, Walter Kerr called ''That Championship Season'' ''rock solid, bitterly funny, painfully shaming.'' Mr. Miller adapted the play into a film, which he also directed. Released in 1982, it featured Robert Mitchum as the coach, Bruce Dern as the mayor and Stacy Keach, Martin Sheen and Mr. Sorvino as members of the team. The play was revived in 1999 at the Second Stage Theater.

Born in Long Island City, Queens, Mr. Miller grew up in Scranton and graduated from St. Patrick's and the Jesuit-run University of Scranton, where he studied English and philosophy, acted and won first prize in the Jesuit Eastern Play Contest. According to The Associated Press, Mr. Miller later earned a master's degree from Catholic University in Washington.

But in a 1974 interview in The Times, Mr. Miller said he was asked to leave the speech and drama department at Catholic University ''for never attending classes, never taking tests and never getting the girls back to their dormitory by 10 o'clock.''

At Catholic University, Mr. Miller met his wife, Linda, Jackie Gleason's daughter, with whom he had three children. Mr. Miller had a fourth child with a girlfriend, Susan Bernard.

To earn money, Mr. Miller worked as a welfare investigator, waiter, truck driver and messenger boy. Along the way he wrote plays, among them ''The Circus Lady,'' ''Perfect Son'' and ''Lou Gehrig Did Not Die of Cancer.'' One of them, ''Nobody Hears a Broken Drum,'' was produced off Broadway in 1970.

Just weeks before ''That Championship Season'' opened in May 1972 at the Public Theater, Mr. Miller was drawing unemployment checks. Mr. Papp knew Mr. Miller from his performance in ''Subject to Fits,'' a Public Theater production.

After ''That Championship Season,'' Mr. Miller went on to act in other projects, including ''The Nickel Ride,'' a 1973 film, and ''The Dain Curse,'' a 1978 CBS mini-series based on the Dashiell Hammett novel. But he remained best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning play and for his role in ''The Exorcist'' as a priest battling a young girl's demons.

Mr. Miller and his family eventually moved from Queens to New Jersey. In the 1974 Times interview, Mr. Miller said he could never leave the New York area for long. ''When I was growing up in Scranton, Pa., New York was the capital of my imagination, the El Dorado of my mind,'' he said. ''As soon as I was able, I started visiting whenever I could, coming with a little money and selling my blood on Delancey Street for a few dollars more, to sit and drink in the Cedar Bar, hoping that Jackson Pollock, Allen Ginsberg or Norman Mailer would drop in.''

''And now that I've lived there and know all the criticisms, I still have a great affection for the city,'' he continued. ''Its rhythm and vitality suit me. I need this element of risk for survival since perhaps it is the city's dangers that force me to creativity. The point is, I went to New York to do something. And I did it.''

Most recently, Mr. Miller was artistic director of the Scranton Public Theater and its summer theater festival. He was to play Oscar Madison in the theater's forthcoming production of ''The Odd Couple.''

According to the Associated Press, Mr. Miller is survived by three sons: Jason Patric, the actor, and Joshua Miller, both of Los Angeles; and Jordan Miller of New York City. He is also survived by a daughter, Jennifer Miller of Los Angeles.

The Associated Press reported that Mr. Miller described his own epitaph last year in an interview with Electric City, a free entertainment weekly, for the Pennsylvania Film Festival: ''On my tombstone I'll put, 'It's all a paper moon.' All the philosophies and all the -isms and all the religions are contained in that. . . . I'd prefer that when I take the bus to another zone, I go further. I'm not interested in coming back.''

Correction: May 16, 2001, Wednesday An obituary of the playwright and actor Jason Miller yesterday referred incompletely to his marriage to Linda Gleason, with whom he had three children. The couple were later divorced.

The New York Times