Mr. Miller, Mr. Mayer and this top-flight cast have indeed found the tragic muse in a kitchen sink in Brooklyn.

By the end of this period and following roles in a number of prestige productions, critics were wondering if Binoche was typecast as the tragic, despairing muse.

They both understood that Mr. Rifkin, with his perpetually moist eyes and his face lined by melancholy, was for Mr. Baitz a dark, almost tragic muse.

Below the statues were semi-circular recesses containing basso relievos of tragic and comic muses.

There have been artists, generally of the smacked-out bedsitter blues variety, who lost their tragic muse after a bit of success.

Nick becomes a full-time painter, and when Miriam comes to London in search of theatrical success, she sits to Nick for her portrait as "the tragic muse."

It is a testament to Mr. McQueen's talent that, from a tragic muse, he was able to make a celebratory collection.

Fisher has observed that Puccini's was a tragic muse; in the second act of Tosca, according to Newman, he rises to his greatest height as a master of the musical macabre.

A work that indeed finds the tragic muse in a kitchen sink (2:10).

If Leo Nucci's Count di Luna failed to rise above routine, Violeta Urmana's Azucena was the passionate, majestically vocalized incarnation of a veritable tragic muse.