Rebecca Miller
Rebecca Miller is a filmmaker and screenwriter famous for her movies Personal Velocity: Three Portraits and The Ballad of Jack and Rose.
She returns to the big screen this week with the release of The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, which stars Robin Wright Penn.
Born in Connecticut Rebecca Miller is the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller, so it's fair to say that writing is in her blood.
But it was a directing career that she pursued after leaving Yale University but a career in acting.
Like many actors she began in television with TV movie The Murder of Mary Phagan before moving into cinema.
She appeared in Regarding Henry alongside Harrison Ford and Annette Bening in 1991 before moving onto Wind and Consenting Adults.
It was 2005 when she moved behind the camera for the first time with her movie Angela, which she also wrote.
The film follows Angela (Miranda Stuart Ryne) and Ellie (Charlotte Blythe) who are two sisters caught up in an increasingly deteriorating family life.
They cope with their troubles by conjuring up a whole new world all of their own, and navigate their way through some fantastic new pastures limited only by Angela's imagination.
The film was a hit critically as it found award success on the festival circuit picking up gongs at the Sundance Film Festival as well as the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film.
However it was not a success at the box office. Miller didn't make another movie for seven years.
In her time away from her film career she met and married British actor Daniel Day Lewis, who starred in the big screen adaptation of her father's play The Crucible, and had two sons.
In 2002 she returned with Personal Velocity: Three Portraits, an adaptation of a collection of short stories called Personal Velocity.
The film follows three very different women confront life-changing decisions in this film, each woman has reached a turning point in her life.
Delia (Kyra Sedgwick) finally takes a stand and leaves her abusive husband, but still has to find a way to regain her power and life; Greta (Parker Posey) achieves more professional success than she ever imagined, but has fidelity issues when it comes to her marriage and her lovable but dull husband; and, on the heels of a tragic accident, Paula (Fairuza Balk) has to contend with an unplanned pregnancy and the status of her personal relationships.
Miller's second movie once again well met on the festival circuit as it scooped the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and Miller had introduced herself as a filmmaker.
She worked with her real-life husband for 2005 picture The Ballad of Jack and Rose, a film that really struggled at the box office failed to make back it's $1.5 million budget.
Despite this career of mixed success Miller is back this week with The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, adapted from the novel of the same name.
Miller brings together an impressive cast of Robin Wright Penn, Alan Arkin, Keanu Reeves, Monica Bellucci and Julianne Moore for the movie, that is produced by Brad Pitt.
From all outward appearances, Pippa Lee (Robin Wright Penn) leads a charmed existence.
An anchor of feminine serenity, she is the devoted wife of an accomplished publisher (Alan Arkin) thirty years her senior, the proud mother of two grown children, and a trusted friend and confidant to all who cross her path.
But as Pippa dutifully follows her husband to a new life in a staid Connecticut retirement community, her idyllic world and the persona she has built over the course of her marriage will be put to the ultimate test.
Embarking on a bittersweet journey of self-discovery, along with help from a new, strange and soulful acquaintance (Keanu Reeves), Pippa must now confront both her volatile past and the hidden undercurrents of her seemingly placid world to find the true sense of self which has always eluded her.
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is out now.
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw