![]() ![]() She often represented young people, including those who were homeless, those who were involved in the sex work industry, and those who had mental health or drug abuse problems. She started devouring plays and took acting classes, realising in the process that she "deeply understood" characters.Īfter a brief stint in corporate law, Miller began working as a human rights and children's rights lawyer in community legal centres. "I don't remember what the play was, but I remember being blown away and going, 'I want to do that. It was around the same time that the then-22-year-old saw her first professional play. Miller first studied science, then in 1987 she embarked on a law degree, moving to Sydney to study at The University of New South Wales. "My brother played six roles or something, and we'd invite the whole neighbourhood," she recalls.ĭespite her passion for writing, she didn't consider pursuing it after school: "I didn't think of it as something that you could do." The path to writing She also wrote plays - including an annual nativity play. I went to a Catholic convent school, so there was a bit of moralising going on." "I wrote about young girls or boys that were really poor, who had to struggle to survive. "Because my grandfather didn't like the fact that she had been an actor … never talked about theatre or acting in our family." "She didn't get married till she was in her 40s, because she didn't want to give it up," Miller told Sarah Kanowski for ABC RN's Big Weekend of Books. One of Miller's grandmothers was an actress in musical theatre, and played piano for silent films - though she was given an ultimatum by her prospective husband (Miller's grandfather): a choice between her performance career or marriage. Miller grew up in a working class Catholic family in St Kilda, inner-city Melbourne, although her family relocated for a time to a small remote Northern Territory town where her engineer father worked in an aluminium mine. That was the reason I did law," she says.īut in the end, it is Miller's theatre, not her legal work, that has had the biggest impact. "I really did have a bit of a passion in my belly to change the world. ![]() It's a remarkable achievement for a play that its writer thought would never get up – and a triumph for the 59-year-old, in the second act of her career after 15 years as a defence lawyer. Accepting the Tony award, Comer said: "Without her, my performance would not be here, so this feels just as much Suzie's as it is mine."
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