Jason Miller
Jason Miller is an actor, born 1939.
Miller was a playwright who acted, and the order matters. Born in Queens in 1939, he wrote That Championship Season, which won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play, a set of credentials almost nobody in horror cinema has ever carried.
The same year, The Exorcist cast him as Father Damien Karras. It remains one of the great pieces of casting: Karras is a Jesuit and a psychiatrist whose faith has quietly collapsed before the film even starts, and Miller plays him with the exhaustion of a man doing a job he no longer believes in. The famous scenes belong to the possession, but the performance lives in the small ones, the guilt in the domestic scenes, the flat clinical questions, the long silences. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
His screen career afterwards kept circling the same author's material. He was Lieutenant Frankie Reno in The Ninth Configuration in 1980 and returned as Karras in The Exorcist III in 1990, both drawn from the writing of William Peter Blatty. Away from that orbit he was Benjamin Rasnick in Light of Day, Coach Ara Parseghian in Rudy, and a doctor in the late horror film The Eternal.
He went back to Scranton, where That Championship Season is set, and ran the Scranton Public Theatre as its artistic director. He was born in 1939 and died in 2001. The screen record is thin, and one performance in it is permanent.
Movies (7)
Where to start with Jason Miller
Nothing else here comes close to The Exorcist, and there is no better way in, though watch it for Karras rather than for the shocks: the film's real subject is a priest who has lost his faith and has to behave as though he has not. The Ninth Configuration is the deep cut and the most interesting thing he did outside that role, a strange, talky asylum picture from the same writer. The Exorcist III brings him back with a very different assignment and a much odder film around him. Rudy is where most American viewers met him later, playing a college football coach with quiet authority. Light of Day and The Eternal are for completists only.