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Lee Miller: The Angel and The Fiend
LOS ANGELES
TIMES In the pictures on the walls, certain images recur. The line of a woman's neck, the curve of her side from breast to hip, the lovely wide and still mouth. Some of the images are photographs, some are paintings barely recognizable as portraits. They are the work of several men but depict only one woman. Lee Miller, according to the title of the exhibition that will be at the Getty through June 15, was the "Surrealist Muse." In other eras, in other rooms, the face of the muse is clearer. In the statuary of ancient Greece, she is one of nine demi-goddesses able to bestow genius on the deserving. At the Tate Gallery in London, she fills an entire room of Pre-Raphaelite paintings -- their creators had many models, but it was Elizabeth Siddal's face, framed by her famous flowing hair, that dominates the early work, now as Beatrice, now as Ophelia. Thousands of miles and a century away, in Chadd's Ford, Penn., a square-jawed woman with braids and an unreadable gaze appears, filling the canvases and sketchbooks of Andrew Wyeth. Nor do painters own the muse. The words of Dante and Poe and Fitzgerald repeatedly evoke and pay homage to the one woman who mattered, the one woman who could ignite art with a glance. For Dante, she was Beatrice, glimpsed when still a child; for Poe his young cousin-wife, Virginia; for Fitzgerald, the doomed Zelda. The muse was not always young or kind; Norah Joyce famously thought little of husband James' chosen career even after he'd immortalized her as the ecstatic Molly Bloom. But for many artists, mostly male, the muse was both woman and ideal. More than an object of desire, she was that which inexplicably stood between them and the yawning, empty dark. "Give all to love," wrote Emerson. "Obey the heart; Friends, kindred, days, Estate, good fame, Plans, credit and the Muse, Nothing refuse." For Emerson, the muse was more ether than flesh, the intangible spirit found in nature, or art itself, that made creation possible. Lee Miller would come to adopt a similar attitude when, in her mid-20s, she traded one end of the lens for the other. The second and third rooms of the Getty exhibition chronicle her shift from subject to artist, and while her early work echoes Man Ray and the surrealists, Miller quickly shook off the shadows of the muse to become, perhaps, the last of her kind. "The muse never really reinvented herself," L.A. artist Eileen Corwin says. "But Lee Miller did." "We look at the many ways inspiration occurs," says Weston Naef, who curated the Lee Miller show. "At the many sources including raw nature, or art itself. It's really just the process of looking at surroundings in a new way. Lee Miller was a primal force who changed more lives than they changed hers." In doing so, she helped redefine the term to include a kindred artistic spirit who creates as much as inspires. Someone who looks more perhaps like Frida Kahlo or Yoko Ono than Ophelia. The postmodern muse. A mother discovered Antony Penrose, a dairy farmer from Sussex, England, sits in the Getty Museum's Harold M. Williams Auditorium and watches a woman pretend to be his mother. Penrose is the son of Lee Miller and surrealist artist Roland Penrose, and he wrote the play he is watching: "Angel and Fiend." Twenty-five years after her death, Penrose is still trying to figure out who, and what, his mother was exactly. "She was very devoid of personal vanity," he says of the woman who, according to Time magazine, possessed "the most beautiful navel in Paris." "It would have surprised her to realize how big of an impact she had." In a way, Miller was groomed to be a muse. Her father, an avid photographer, shot countless portraits of his beautiful young daughter, including many nudes. So it wasn't surprising that Miller began her career as a model for women's magazines. But she wanted to be an artist as well. When she moved to Paris at 22, she immediately attached herself, first artistically and later physically, to surrealist photographer Man Ray. She served as his model for years and also posed for other artists including Max Ernst and Picasso. In her late 20s, she left Man Ray and Paris and set up her own photography studio in New York. When the United States entered World War II, she talked her way into a job as war correspondent for Vogue. She photographed, among other things, the liberation of several death camps, the destruction of buildings and lives. Her work lost its surrealist tone completely and became more her own. "By the time you get to '45, the idea that there is a muse is completely absent," says Naef, who is curator of photographs at the Getty. She never achieved the fame her lovers had. After her marriage to Penrose and the birth of her son, she settled into the role of chef and hostess to many of the artists whose work she had inspired. In her later years, she worked less and drank more. She was, by all accounts, a difficult wife and, according to her son, a perfectly hopeless mother. "I would have starved to death if it hadn't been for the housekeeper and other sympathetic onlookers," he says. "We didn't really speak for years." Penrose knew little of his mother's work until after her death. He was digging through boxes in search of baby pictures he could show his children and came upon the journals she'd kept during the war. Underneath were hundreds of photographs, some of her, but mostly those that she had taken. "It was the most astonishing moment in my life," he says, "that the person I had known, who couldn't catch a train without hysteria and high drama, had been a completely other person." Since then, he has put together concurrent exhibitions of both his parents' work, written Miller's biography, put together a book about her years during the war, and now this play. Even in death, Miller is once again the muse, this time to her son. "She is," he says, "a much better muse than she was a mother." "The word is 'complicated,' " Naef says to describe Miller and her relationship with just about anyone. But then, it's never been easy to be a muse. Changing face of inspiration "So oft have I invoked thee for my Muse," begins Shakespeare's 63rd sonnet, "and found such fair assistance in my verse." The muse has changed much since the nine headstrong daughters of Zeus appeared on the pages of Homer. During the Renaissance, she was downgraded from deity to Idealized Beauty. Neither Dante nor Petrarch ever met the women they spent their lives writing about; both were spied across a crowded arcade. Many of Shakespeare's sonnets seemed aimed at and inspired by an individual, but she (or some argue, he) remains consigned to obscurity. A few centuries later, Alice Liddell may have spent her winter years dining out on her famous child-friendship with Lewis Carroll, but many other women found that as a career choice, musedom left something to be desired. "He feeds upon her face by day and night," Rossetti's poet-sister Christina wrote of his relationship with Siddal, "and she with true kind eyes looks back on him,/Fair as the moon and joyful as the light ....Not as she is but as she fills his dream." The Romantics preferred the muse passive and almost holy in her beauty. Virginia Poe inspired her husband mostly with her early death, Zelda with her madness. Siddal eventually died of a laudanum overdose after Rossetti, who had finally married her, abandoned her for Jane Morris, who, conveniently enough, became his next muse. Post-Victorian attitudes allowed the muse a sexier side, and modern influences -- feminism, individualism -- have, some believe, made her obsolete. Why would a woman be a muse rather than an artist? Or, for that matter, a high-powered agent? Indeed, many of those who physically survived musedom -- Camille Claudel, Rodin's longtime mistress; Gala Dali, Salvador's wife; Picasso's many wives and paramours -- would not be considered happy women. High drama often infuses artistic relationships, but there was also an inherent inequity in the muse-artist relationship. "When the Muse makes claim for the recognition of her usefulness, the artist is in for trouble," French medievalist and philosopher Etienne Gilson wrote in his 1953 book, "Choir of Muses." A proper muse, a muse who shoots for true immortality, he says, allows the artists to decide what credit is due, and when. Which makes it difficult to calculate a salary, or even a day rate. In Albert Brooks' satirical 1999 film "The Muse," Sharon Stone, who played an actual divinity, was very specific about her remuneration requirements. Presents from Tiffany, and not the key rings either. It's easy to hypothesize but hard to really know how many muses were, like Miller, artists in their own right, thwarted by the times. Traditionally, a muse was supposed to simply take satisfaction from the contact she had with greatness. In "The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired," Francine Prose includes Hester Thrale, a smart, witty, socially ambitious brewer's wife who became friend and muse to Dr. Samuel Johnson. He never tired of her conversation, and in fact moved in with her and her husband for weeks when struck down by depression and writer's block. After Johnson's death, Thrale wrote several books herself, including one about her relationship with Johnson; in 1788, she published his letters to her. Although her influence on his work had been universally acknowledged, her mentioning it was considered unseemly and her exploitation of the friendship -- for fame and money -- utterly scandalous (though of course the books did rather well). That Johnson had used the friendship in much the same way was not even considered. Miller tasted a bit of this gall when she rescued from the bin a photograph Man Ray had taken of her neck and shoulder, and re-exposed it, creating a form at once the same and different from the original. When she called it her own, Man Ray became so enraged, he painted a picture that included the same neck -- slashed. "Certainly, feminism has made us reconsider musedom as a career choice," Prose writes. "Pre-Victorian artists still had an idealized vision [of the muse] -- the one-way street of the male gaze," says Julian Cox, assistant curator of photographs at the Getty. "The post-Edwardian years started to liberate women -- you had the suffragette movement, the '20s flappers. And there was a more carnal, more realistic and more equal relationship." Some believe that this equal relationship embodied by painters Kahlo and Diego Rivera, dancer Suzanne Farrell and choreographer George Balanchine, painters Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, even Yoko Ono and John Lennon has all but killed the muse. Courtly love, and even the romanticizing of free love, has given way to a much more pragmatic discourse between lovers, which is reflected in current art. Although No Doubt's Gwen Stefani may have sung many songs about her boyfriend, and fashionistas still refer to Amanda Harlech as the Chanel muse, Dante's Beatrice -- that beloved face appearing again and again -- is pretty much nowhere to be found. Having a certain something "The concept of the muse is part of the Romantic tradition," says David Halle, a professor of sociology at UCLA who believes the muse is dead. "And this is just not a romantic age. "We are a more democratic society; we do not idealize individuals anymore," Halle adds. "And people who are idols tend to be torn down rather quickly." But some artists still recognize the muse as an artistic force and a real person. David Glynn, an L.A.-based artist, has used many models in his work, which ranges from oil painting to digital art, and among them he has met a few he considers muse-like. "There is something about some people," he says. "They're art-ready, they have a light within themselves. And while I can't wait to find a muse to work, when I meet one of these people, they are inspiring." At a drawing workshop in New York, he met a dancer for the Paul Taylor Dance Company. "I thought, 'Wow, who is this?' " Glynn used her in several of his works and was not at all surprised to see, a year or so later, her face staring down at him all over town from advertisements for the company. "She just has that whatever it is. One model described it to me as 'being in creation,' " he says. "A true muse is part of the creative process, an example of how being seen is a creative act." Weston Naef thinks the muse is in the same state of health as creativity, although the packaging may be different. "The muse is no more retro than genius," he says. "It may have become an unpopular notion, but we all know it exists." One of the problems, he says, is that people tend to think of the muse as female, which is no longer true and hasn't been for a while. Oscar Wilde's certainly was not; writer Christopher Isherwood and painter Don Bachardy had an ever-shifting mutual muse relationship. But historically, few women who became artists could acknowledge a man as a muse. One of the most famous images by 19th century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron is titled "The Whisper of the Muse," and although the muse is represented by two young girls, the photo itself is a tribute to painter George Frederic Watts, who was one of her greatest advisors and influences. But, says the Getty's Cox, "as an upper-middle-class married woman, she would never have referred to a man as her muse." Cameron photographed many winsome young women, including a teenage Alice Siddal, but the most overtly muselike was her niece Julia Jackson. Who became the mother of Virginia Woolf. Who famously insisted that what a woman artist really needed was not divine inspiration, but a room of one's own and enough money to eat properly. Artist Corwin wonders if Woolf's observation isn't the best definition of the modern muse. Corwin uses her husband often in her work, and although she says she could not be the artist she is without him, she does not consider him her muse, exactly. "I am madly in love with my husband," she says, "and he has certainly changed my life by his presence. So maybe it's just that we need a new definition for muse." When she talks with her mostly female artist friends, she says, the word "muse" does not come up. "We talk instead about how supportive our spouses are. Not so much how one person inspired our work, but how they made it possible by giving us time or space." According to Cox, this is not surprising. "Most practicing artists would use other terms to describe their 'influences,' " he says. "They wouldn't want to give over the control which that term implies." Which is a real consideration. When Lee Miller left Man Ray, Penrose writes in "The Lives of Lee Miller," the artist found solace by modifying a piece he had done. "Object of Destruction" was a metronome with the photo of an eye attached to the pendulum weight. Man Ray made the eye Miller's and on the back of the piece, he wrote, "Legend, Cut out the eye from a portrait of one who has been loved but is seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow." Apparently, having a muse has never been easy either.
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LOS ANGELES TIMES Antony Penrose grew up with a mother who kept the better part of herself locked in the attic above his bedroom in an English farmhouse. His play, "Lee Miller, the Angel and the Fiend," tells the story of the remarkable woman she was. Penrose discovered the angel only after her death in 1977, having suffered the fiend for most of the 30 years that came before. Miller's life and work are chronicled in "Surrealist Muse," an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum that runs through June 15 and gave rise to Penrose's play. The art show's four rooms of paintings and photographs, and the five-character script, trace a life that could belong to a character in a novel. Miller debuted as a model in Roaring '20s New York, a magnetic blond beauty splashed on the pages of Condé Nast's magazines. She matured in 1930s Paris, first inspiring the likes of Pablo Picasso and her lover, Man Ray, then emerging as an artist in her own right, a photographer who often made famous men and women -- including Picasso and Man Ray -- her subjects. Her career crested during World War II, when Miller, writing and shooting for Vogue, produced shocking, unsparing reportage from the front lines, including indelible images of heaped corpses and living skeletons at the Dachau concentration camp and a wrenching portrait of a dying infant in a Viennese hospital. After filing from Dachau, she cabled her editor in capital letters: "I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE." Penrose grew up ignorant of all this. His mother refused to talk about it, and his father, painter and art historian Roland Penrose, honored her wishes. Antony Penrose didn't get to truly know his mother until his wife, Suzanna, summoned him to the attic shortly after Miller's death and showed him boxes filled with her pictures, her writings, her life. A filmmaker and dairy farmer, he became his mother's biographer and the custodian of his parents' artistic legacy. Penrose has integrated much of that hidden hoard into "Lee Miller, the Angel and the Fiend," which premiered with three performances at the Getty this month and opens this weekend at the Chance Theater in Anaheim Hills. In another familial twist, the author's second cousin, Erika Ceporius, the grandniece of Lee Miller, plays the title role. Penrose culled much of the script from letters and diaries he found in the farmhouse trove; rather than playing out scenes face-to-face, the actors deliver their parts directly to the audience while a series of 318 images of and by Lee Miller are projected above them. The title is not Penrose's comment on his mother's character, but her own: "I looked like an angel," she wrote in a diary, "but I was a fiend inside." Traumatic childhood As he tracked down Miller's story after her death, Penrose, 55, learned from one of her two brothers that the son of a family friend had raped Miller and infected her with a venereal disease when she was 7 years old. That, Penrose thinks, planted a seed of "self-revulsion" that would allow her to label herself a fiend, to fall into alcoholism and to cordon off the most exceptional parts of herself from her son. What he got growing up, he says, was a heap of abuse: "She'd never clout me, but she could be immensely cruel, emotionally cruel. She was very good with words and could skin the hide off me. I really hated her." He credits his wife, who hit it off with Miller, with helping him eventually to make his peace with his mother near the end of her life. But true understanding came only from the attic after Miller's death. In the play, Penrose decided to omit the childhood trauma that could have been the root of her anguish. "It's too tempting for people to see Lee as a damaged, tragic figure. I wanted on this occasion not to dwell on that, but to look at the body of her work." When the Getty OKd his idea of staging a play to accompany its exhibit, Penrose turned immediately to the Chance. He is close to his California family -- all relations on his mother's side. He had watched his young cousin, Ceporius, pursue acting from high school to drama studies in London to her 1999 co-founding of the Chance, a 54-seat theater in a suburban office-industrial park. Ceporius, 25, says it had long been a sort of family joke that she would one day play Lee Miller in the movies -- Penrose having tried for years to interest producers in the story. When her chance came on stage, Penrose was not without misgivings. "I said to her, 'You've got the nice, but you need the nasty. You can do the angel bit, but I need to be convinced that you can do the fiend bit.' " With some help from Penrose and a dialect coach, Ceporius came up with a New York accent (Miller hailed from Poughkeepsie) that packs a tough, ragged punch. Penrose says she has captured his edgy mom. The show marks Ceporius' debut under her new stage name, Erika C. Miller. The switch points up her blood ties to her role, but is also, she says, a way of henceforth matching her performing name to the "standard American girl-next-door type" she projects. Director Oanh Nguyen, another Chance co-founder, thought there was a missing element in the script itself: It needed more of Penrose. Nguyen wanted to frame the piece with the image of Penrose in the farmhouse attic, discovering his mother for the first time, and he wanted to flesh out the fleeting bits Penrose had written for the actor who would play himself. "He had his hesitations," said Nguyen, 29, who is married to Ceporius. "He was modest, and he didn't want to be the focal point." Kidman as Miller? Penrose, whose soft, polite voice projects great passion for his mother's work, is modest about his first venture as a playwright. After deciding to tell the stories with excerpts from the characters' own writings, he says, it was more a matter of editing a bunch of eloquent, intrinsically dramatic people than creating a play from whole cloth. Besides Penrose and his parents, the characters are Man Ray and David Scherman, an American photojournalist who was Lee Miller's lover and colleague during World War II. For Penrose, the definitive dramatic word on Lee Miller isn't his own, but David Hare's. The British playwright has crafted a screenplay about her life, tailored for Nicole Kidman. Since 1998, Kidman (via her former husband Tom Cruise's production company, Cruise/Wagner) has held the rights to Penrose's 1985 biography, "The Lives of Lee Miller." Hare and Kidman have a track record together. She was famously unclad in London and New York in 1998-99 while starring in "The Blue Room," his adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's "La Ronde," and he wrote the screenplay for "The Hours," which featured Kidman as another troubled artist, novelist Virginia Woolf -- a performance for which she recently won the Oscar for best actress. "I feel as if Lee is in safe hands with those two," Penrose says. "If they make it as it's written now, it's going to be fantastic and I'm going to love it." Ceporius apparently won't get to live out her girlhood fantasy of playing her great-aunt on screen, but she and Nguyen, a film actor himself, will happily settle for having teamed with Penrose to put Lee Miller on stage for the first time. The couple, who married two years ago after he proposed to her on the Chance's stage, took out $75,000 in loans to fund the theater's launching. Now in its fifth season, the Chance has emerged as a prolific little theater that typically produces more than 10 plays a year -- unknown new works, many of them on historical subjects, as well as standards such as a series of pocket-sized productions of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. Now, they say, the debt is virtually paid off and the 18-member company hopes to move to a bigger space in Orange County. While the Chance partners bring "Lee Miller, the Angel and the Fiend" to their home theater, the play is having its British premiere this weekend in conjunction with a Lee Miller exhibit at the University of Manchester. Penrose says showings of his mother's photography have been "almost continuous" somewhere or other in the world over the past five years, and now he'll offer exhibitors his play as a complement to her images. In the play's final moment, Ceporius poses in a white gown, arms outstretched, wing-like, as she re-creates in bloodline-accurate flesh the photo of her great-aunt that's blown up behind her. It's the angel redeemed from the fiend, a once-embittered son's excavation into the past having unlocked, at last, an understanding, an appreciation, a sense of connection. "I gave the world a photographer who was previously
unknown," Penrose's character says near the end of the play. "But
I also gave myself a mother who was previously unknown to me."
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OC WEEKLY In 1929, Miller, already a successful fashion model, became the student and lover of photographer Man Ray (Ventura Alvarez). She was the subject of some of his most memorable work, but she grew tired of his incessant jealousy and left him to marry a prosperous Egyptian, whom she later left for English artist Roland Penrose (Sean Hannaway). She joined Penrose in England just in time for the Blitz, where she tried to follow the Surrealist creed by seeking wonder in the images of destruction. But she soon became restless and joined Life magazine photographer David Scherman (Warren Draper) in Europe as a war correspondent for Vogue. Her experiences, particularly the discovery of Dachau and the pervasive corruption she found after the war, caused her to emotionally withdraw, turning her into the difficult, hard-drinking woman Antony Penrose (John Bolen) knew as his mother. Despite some occasional awkwardness in the frame
device and an uncomfortable awareness of actors standing in the dark,
waiting for their turn to speak, director Oanh Nguyen’s spare, effective
staging keeps us focused on the vital elements: the history, the personalities,
the words and, most especially, the unforgettable photos projected onscreen
center stage that document a remarkable life. Taken as a whole, "Lee
Miller: The Angel and the Fiend" is more than just a biography of
notable talent or even a behind-the-scenes look at the lives of the Surrealists:
it’s a love letter to a difficult mother, a posthumous accommodation
with a powerfully free spirit.
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LOS ANGELES TIMES Lee Miller was a close associate of these artists and a remarkable talent in her own right. After an early career as a fashion model, the New York-born Miller pursued a career as a photographer, becoming Man Ray's studio assistant, lover and muse. Later, she covered World War II as a photographer and reporter. Since her death in 1977, Miller has been championed by Antony Penrose, her son with Surrealist painter Roland Penrose. He wrote the 1985 biography "The Lives of Lee Miller" and has now crafted a theater piece, "Lee Miller: The Angel and the Fiend," which is being presented at the Chance Theater, an Anaheim Hills venue co-founded by Miller's grandniece, Erika Ceporius Miller. Ceporius Miller's husband, Oanh Nguyen, directed the presentation. A combination slide show and concert reading, the program tells Miller's life story in images of and by her, accompanied by excerpts from letters and diaries, which capture her mercurial personality. Antony Penrose is portrayed by John Bolen, sitting among boxes of writings that mother kept hidden from son. Ceporius Miller, as Lee Miller, speaks from a lectern, while three influential men in her life -- Man Ray (Ventura Alvarez), Roland Penrose (Sean Hannaway) and photographer David Scherman (Warren Draper) -- are posted behind music stands. Only their faces are visible in the darkened theater, so as not to draw too much focus from the show's true stars: the projected photographs. Miller's war photos are the most resonant images. She
captured something elemental, whether documenting a life-or-death surgery
at an Omaha Beach field hospital or recording the ghostly beauty that
clung to bomb-shattered cities. Many of the pictures bear an astonishing
resemblance to what has been transmitted out of Iraq -- making them both
timely and timeless.
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ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER What must it have been like to be a fashion model on the cutting edge of the surrealist movement during the 1930s and to be drafted by an international magazine to photograph and report on the horrors of World War II? Lee Miller was indeed such a person, and thanks to several books and now a play by her son Antony Penrose documenting her experiences, we no longer have to imagine the answer. Called "Lee Miller: The Angel and the Fiend," the play plunges us into Miller's world. Coming off a staging at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, this "reading for five voices" at the Chance Theater in Anaheim Hills is surprisingly brief - some 70 minutes total. The surprise is in how much Penrose is able to
pack into that running time, including Miller's birth in New York City
in April 1907; her early days as a model for Vogue magazine; her fascination
with photography (and photographers), which took her back and forth between
New York and Paris; her involvement in the surrealist movement and its
decidedly nonconformist credo; and her on-again, off-again affair with
surrealist artist Roland Penrose, which took her to London during the
Blitz, opening the door to her days as a war correspondent. That Penrose manages to convey all of this in just over an hour can be regarded as at least as miraculous as some of the events of his mother's life, which was well-documented by photographers and artists. Their photos and paintings are an integral part of this show, which flashes some 318 slides onto a large screen upstage. That screen becomes, in some respects, a canvas upon which director Oanh Nguyen paints Miller's life. The dozens of archival photos, combined with the accounts of the four primary characters, provide a kind of visual shorthand that illustrates Miller's remarkable audacity, toughness and fortitude. Erika Ceporius, who portrays Miller, has fashioned crisp costumes that capture the '40s flair for style; Joseph Horn's set uses authentic Penrose family artifacts; and composer David O's music is wistful and unobtrusive. The play begins in the present, as Penrose (John Bolen), sitting in the farmhouse attic, pores over family photos and letters between his parents. At first sounding vaguely British, Ceporius soon settles into an accent that's part British, part New Yorker, as she continues to relate the life story begun by Antony's narration. "I looked like an angel," Miller says, "but I was a fiend inside." We meet the important men in her life - surrealist artist, photographer and fellow New Yorker Man Ray (Ventura Alvarez), whose jealousy over Miller's free-love attitude drove her away; British surrealist artist (and kindred spirit) Roland Penrose (Sean Hannaway); and Life magazine photographer David Scherman (Warren Draper), with whom Miller witnessed many of war's horrors first- hand. Bolen is a soft-spoken first-hand narrator, but at times his delivery is so low-key and his articulation so indistinct that it's hard to discern his words. Hannaway's British accent is more lilting than Bolen's, his Roland breezy and dashing, his face beaming with transparent passion for Lee. Alvarez uses a Bronx accent and hair-trigger temper to sketch Man Ray. As Scherman, Draper also speaks New York-ese, his voice filled with admiration for the exploits of a woman he loved but knew could never love him back. Ceporius has more in common with Miller than the fact that both are "blond and fairly tall" - her maternal grandfather was Miller's brother, prompting her to be listed in the program as "Erika Ceporius Miller." And though Ceporius delivers her great-aunt's words with conviction, she doesn't get to the heart of Miller's true grit or help explain the nature of Miller's self-perception as a "fiend." It's also clear, from the many photos of Miller, that there was more going on inside her than Ceporius' striking prettiness and elegant manner communicate, notwithstanding the emotion in the actress's voice once Miller had turned "bitter at heart" over war's atrocities and the ugly aftermath. The stomach-churning realities Miller reported make "The
Angel and the Fiend" a powerful script and slide show, difficult
to witness without flinching, yet witness we must. Miller could have taken
the easy road, living as a New York model, but she forced herself to confront
life's truths, her idealism turning to disillusionment. That kind of sacrifice
characterizes the conduct of an angel - even one who sees herself as anything
but.
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AOL DIGITAL CITY The fascinating life of photographer Lee Miller provides the subject matter for this dramatized reading and slide show. Miller's life story proves that truth is sometimes more interesting than fiction. She was "discovered" by none other than the great Conde Nast, who yanked her out of the path of an oncoming bus and launched her, fairytale-style, into a modeling career. She graced early covers of Vogue and posed for godfathers of fashion photography before moving to the other side of the lens. At 25, she opened a successful photo studio. Tumultuous love affairs and a highly unconventional lifestyle made her a favorite of international gossip pages, but Miller's most significant contribution to history was as a Surrealist artist, spokesperson and muse. She also earned acclaim as a portrait photographer and utterly fearless World War II correspondent. Because of her wartime experiences, however, she gave up art in the mid-1950s. Miller's surviving family members rekindle her
legacy. Written by her only son Antony Penrose and starring her niece
Erika Miller, this performance provides a fascinating glimpse at a Surrealist
legend. Oanh Nguyen directs.
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