Ruthie Ann Miles's Daughter Died. She's Processing It Onstage.

"Ruthie Ann Miles's musical-theater career has been a study in grieving mothers. Not long after becoming one of the most exciting theater actresses in the world when she won the Best Supporting Actress in a Musical Tony for her work in The King and I,the performer left Broadway for five years. On March 16, 2018, her daughter, Abigail, 4, died after they were both hit by a car in Manhattan. Miles survived, but was expecting at the time and lost the pregnancy."

"Based on Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, the surrealist musical follows one nuclear family across thousands of years and three apocalypses. Mrs. Antrobus is an archetypal mother - prim, proper, and protective of her children - and implied to be Eve herself. She's mourning the death of her son Abel, who was killed at the hand of her other son, Cain. Her husband, meanwhile, cannot stop himself from helping other people, but hates their remaining"

Ruthie Ann Miles's career centers on portrayals of grieving mothers, informed by personal tragedies including the 2018 death of her daughter Abigail and the loss of a pregnancy. She left Broadway for five years, moved to Los Angeles for television, and returned to New York stages in 2023. Miles won a Tony for The King and I, later received a second nomination for Sweeney Todd, and headlined The Light in the Piazza. Her recent performance as Mrs. Antrobus in The Seat of Our Pants portrayed a woman mourning a murdered son across millennia, delivering restrained, deeply felt emotion without hysteria.

Read at Vulture