Natalie Miller’s world of movies
A lifetime of memories in Natalie Miller's new book.
NATALIE Miller’s career in the film industry has spanned more than 50 years and includes working for the Melbourne Film Festival, establishing her own film distribution company and running well-known Melbourne cinemas, Longford in South Yarra and Nova in Carlton.
She has been on the board of Film Victoria and ACMI and recently established the Natalie Miller Fellowship to support talented young women in the film industry.
Miller was honoured with an OAM in 2001 and an AO in 2013 for distinguished service to the film industry.
She is celebrating her life’s work with the publication of Projecting Natalie Miller, a coffee-table book that is part-memoir filled with personal recollections, photos, newspaper articles and interviews with family members, plus tributes penned by film industry leaders and movie directors including Joel Pearlman, Alan Finney and Fred Schepisi.
“I have been blessed to meet and work with so many extraordinary people – directors, producers, writers, actors, film distributors, exhibitors and sales agents,” Miller writes in the book’s introduction.
Born in Elwood in 1937 into a traditional Jewish family, Natalie Sharpe studied Arts at Melbourne University. In 1962 she married textile businessman Henry Miller.
It was while she worked for the Melbourne Film Festival that she saw a gap in the market for arthouse films and in 1967 established film distribution company Sharmill Films.
Miller made annual visits to the Cannes Film Festival to secure the rights to arthouse films to screen in Australia.
During the COVID-19 lockdown, Miller completed work on her book project with Deborah Blashki-Marks of Mind Film and Publishing, which is being launched next week.
Despite her cinemas being closed during lockdown, Miller remains optimistic about the future of the film industry.
“TV screens may have kept us company during lockdown, but there is simply no substitute for the big screen experience,” she notes in her book.
“There will always be a film industry. When videos came out, then DVDs, then Netflix and so on, there were always those who said it was the end of cinema, but none of these have stopped the drive people have to go and have that big cinema experience.”
Projecting Natalie Miller is published by Mind Film and Publishing and is available from Readings bookshops.