Rebecca Miller, the director who won her biggest prizes filming Martin Scorsese

Rebecca Miller

Photo: Elena Ternovaja / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 15, 1962 Roxbury, Connecticut, United States
Occupation	Film director, screenwriter and novelist
Known for	Maggie's Plan, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, She Came to Me
Awards	Sundance Grand Jury Prize · Independent Spirit · Open Palm · Emmy · Directors Guild of America

Rebecca Miller has spent most of her working life being introduced as somebody’s relative. Profiles tend to open with her father, the playwright Arthur Miller, or with her husband, Daniel Day-Lewis, and only then reach the films she wrote and directed herself. The irony of her recent run is that the work which finally brought her the industry’s loudest applause is a portrait of yet another man: Mr. Scorsese, her documentary series on Martin Scorsese, won her an Emmy and a Directors Guild award. Her next film turns the camera back to the subject that runs through almost everything she has made, a woman working out how to live on her own terms.

She grew up in Roxbury, Connecticut, the daughter of Arthur Miller and his third wife, the Austrian-born Magnum photographer Inge Morath. The family lived among artists. The sculptor Alexander Calder was a neighbor, and another sculptor nearby, Philip Grausman, gave her drawing lessons. Painting came first. At Yale she studied painting and literature, then went to Munich on a fellowship before settling in New York, where she showed paintings and sculpture, took film classes at The New School and made wordless short films to exhibit alongside her artwork.

Acting came before directing. Miller, born on September 15, 1962, made her stage debut in 1988 as Anya in Peter Brook’s production of The Cherry Orchard and spent the early nineties in supporting film roles for directors including Mike Nichols and Alan J. Pakula. In 1991 she wrote and directed a short, Florence, with Marcia Gay Harden as a woman so empathetic that she absorbs other people’s symptoms, until she catches a neighbor’s amnesia and forgets who she is. It reads now as an early statement of a theme she would keep returning to: identity as something a woman has to defend, borrow or rebuild.

Her first feature, Angela, followed a ten-year-old girl trying to purge her soul of sin in order to cure her mentally ill mother. It screened at Sundance in 1995 and earned Miller the festival’s Filmmakers Trophy. The breakthrough came from her own fiction. Personal Velocity, a 2001 collection of prose portraits of women, became a three-part film starring Kyra Sedgwick, Parker Posey and Fairuza Balk, each playing a woman leaving a life that had closed around her. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2002, brought Miller the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award and entered the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

The following years showed how easily she moved between page and screen. With David Auburn she adapted his Pulitzer-winning play Proof for John Madden, with Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins. The same year she directed Day-Lewis in The Ballad of Jack and Rose, the story of a father and his sixteen-year-old daughter living in isolation, shot in Nova Scotia and on Prince Edward Island with Camilla Belle and Catherine Keener. She then published the novel The Private Lives of Pippa Lee and filmed it herself in 2009, with Robin Wright as a woman whose move to a retirement community with a much older husband stirs up memories of a wild New York youth, and a cast that included Alan Arkin, Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder and Julianne Moore.

Fiction kept pace with film. Jacob’s Folly, her 2013 novel about an eighteenth-century French rake reborn as a housefly in contemporary New York, drew warm reviews, and the story collection Total followed in 2022. On screen, Maggie’s Plan premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015 and reached American cinemas through Sony Pictures Classics the following year. Greta Gerwig played a New Yorker who sets out to have a child alone, falls for a married academic played by Ethan Hawke and later schemes to hand him back to his wife, Julianne Moore. Two years later came Arthur Miller: Writer, an HBO documentary about her father that premiered at Telluride and earned an Emmy nomination.

The weak point in Miller’s career has been continuity rather than talent. Six years separated Pippa Lee from Maggie’s Plan, and eight more passed before She Came to Me, so each new feature has arrived with the burden of a comeback. That last one opened the Berlinale in 2023 with Peter Dinklage as a blocked opera composer, Anne Hathaway and Marisa Tomei, and the reception was split. Screen Daily called it a wry, knotty crowd-pleaser; The Film Stage found it a painfully laugh-free screwball comedy, and TheWrap judged it well-intentioned but bland. For a director whose films are often described as literary, the risk has always been that the writing outruns the drama.

The answer came from an unexpected direction. Mr. Scorsese started as a feature-length documentary and grew into five episodes as Miller, given unrestricted access to Scorsese’s personal archives, followed him from his student days at New York University to the present, with Robert De Niro, Steven Spielberg and Mick Jagger among the interviewees. The series premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2025 and arrived on Apple TV on October 17 that year to near-unanimous praise. In 2026 it won the Emmy for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series, the Directors Guild of America Award for documentary series and two Critics Choice Documentary Awards. The same festival had premiered Anemone, the first feature by her son Ronan Day-Lewis, co-written with his father and marking Daniel Day-Lewis’s first screen role since Phantom Thread. Miller and Day-Lewis met at a screening of The Crucible, the film of her father’s play, and married in November 1996; they have two sons and keep their family life largely out of view.

Her ninth film returns to a woman’s story. Moonsong: A Life In Seven Verses, which Miller adapted from Leonard S. Marcus’s biography Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon, follows the author of Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny through 1930s New York, where she developed a new, sensory approach to children’s books amid turbulent love affairs. Elle Fanning plays Brown, Julianne Moore the poet Michael Strange and Josh Hartnett the socialite Big Bill Gaston. In November 2026 Emma Thompson, Sally Hawkins, Danny Huston, Robert Aramayo and Chloe Pirrie joined the cast as The Veterans began selling the film at the American Film Market. “Margaret feels profoundly modern to me,” Miller said, calling her a figure for young people “looking for a way to live without compromising the multiplicity of their true selves.” Scorsese is an executive producer, and Round Films, her company with Damon Cardasis, is producing. Shooting is scheduled to begin in May 2027.

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Tags: Martin Scorsese, daniel day lewis, Moonsong: A Life In Seven Verses, Rebecca Miller, Maggie's Plan, Mr. Scorsese

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