Jason Miller (1939-2001) was an American playwright and actor who played Father Damien Karras in The Exorcist and won a Pulitzer Prize.
Quick Specs
| Born | John Anthony Miller Jr., April 22, 1939, Queens, New York City; raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania |
| Died | May 13, 2001, Scranton, of a heart attack, aged 62 |
| Education | St. Patrick’s High School and the University of Scranton (English and philosophy); graduate drama study at the Catholic University of America |
| Writing | That Championship Season (Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Play, 1973) |
| Horror roles | Father Damien Karras in The Exorcist (1973, Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor); Patient X in The Exorcist III (1990) |
| Also | The Ninth Configuration (1980), director of the film That Championship Season (1982), Ara Parseghian in Rudy (1993) |
Who He Is
Few people have had a year like Jason Miller’s 1973. His play won the Pulitzer and the Tony. A film role he had to talk his way into earned him an Academy Award nomination. And the face he gave the priest at the heart of The Exorcist became one of the most recognizable in horror. He spent the rest of his life mostly where he started, in the theatre and in Scranton.
He was born in Queens to a teacher and an electrician, from a mainly Irish Catholic family, and he grew up in Scranton. He played basketball for St. Patrick’s High School, studied English and philosophy at the Jesuit-run University of Scranton, then went to Washington for graduate work in drama at Catholic University. The Associated Press later reported that he earned a master’s degree there. Miller told a funnier story: he was asked to leave for never attending classes, never taking tests and never getting the girls back to their dormitory by ten o’clock.
The Work
That Championship Season opened at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in 1972 and moved to Broadway. It is about the members of a winning high school basketball team who reunite with their coach twenty years later, and it drew on Miller’s own years on the St. Patrick’s team. It won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play. In 1982 Miller directed the film version himself, with Robert Mitchum, Paul Sorvino, Martin Sheen, Stacy Keach and Bruce Dern.
The Movies, and What He Did on Them
The Exorcist (1973): William Friedkin had already cast Stacy Keach as Karras when he went to see That Championship Season in New York. In the version Friedkin later told in his memoir, he met the playwright and gave him a copy of William Peter Blatty’s novel. Miller seemed only mildly interested, then called weeks later: “That guy is me.” He paid his own way to California for a screen test. Warner Bros. bought out Keach’s contract, and Miller had the part.
Karras is a Jesuit psychiatrist losing his faith and grieving his mother. Miller plays him tired, guarded and tender, and his collapse in the last act gives the film its emotional weight. He also absorbed Friedkin’s methods. The director fired blanks without warning to get a startled reaction from him, and Miller later called Friedkin “a lunatic” who did not understand actors. For the projectile-vomit scene, Friedkin rehearsed with the stream aimed at Miller’s chest. On the take it hit him in the face, and the disgust on screen is real. The “pea soup” was porridge dyed green, pumped through a thin tube by a technician with a hand crank.
The Exorcist III (1990): Blatty, directing from his own novel, brought Karras back. Miller plays Patient X, a man in a locked psychiatric ward who wears the dead priest’s face.
Between those films he worked steadily in film and TV without chasing stardom: The Ninth Configuration (1980), the TV movies F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood and Marilyn: The Untold Story (as Arthur Miller), Light of Day (1987), and Notre Dame coach Ara Parseghian in Rudy (1993).
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
- He preferred regional theatre to Hollywood. As artistic director of the Scranton Public Theatre, he directed and starred in productions including Harvey, Blithe Spirit and The Lion in Winter.
- In 1998 he toured his one-man play Barrymore’s Ghost, ending with a four-month run off-Broadway.
- He died of a heart attack in Scranton in 2001, before a summer production of The Odd Couple in which he was to play Oscar Madison.
Why He Matters
The Exorcist is remembered for its effects, but it works because of Karras. Miller gave the film a doubter at its center, a man whose guilt the demon can find and use. He played him without vanity, and his final choice is the reason the ending hurts. He brought a playwright’s ear for unhappy men to his only great horror role, and then went home to keep making theatre.