- Born
- 3 November 1938St. Petersburg, Florida, USA
- Died
- 24 March 2020Sarasota, Florida, USA · aged 81
Terrence McNally
The playwright of “Love! Valour! Compassion!” brought gay lives and the AIDS years to Broadway – and won five Tony Awards.
Terrence McNally grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas, where an English teacher encouraged his love of theatre. He studied at Columbia University in New York. In his twenties he was for several years in a relationship with the playwright Edward Albee.
From the 1960s he wrote comedies and dramas, many of them featuring gay characters at a time when this was rare on American stages. In the AIDS years he wrote “Andre’s Mother” (1990), about a mother mourning her son, and “Love! Valour! Compassion!” (1994), about eight gay friends spending summer weekends in the country, which won the Tony Award for best play. “Master Class” (1995), about the opera singer Maria Callas, won another.
His play “Corpus Christi” (1998), which depicted Jesus and his disciples as gay men in Texas, provoked protests and bomb threats. McNally also wrote the books for the musicals “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and “Ragtime”, both of which won Tony Awards.
In 2010 he married the producer Tom Kirdahy. McNally, who had survived lung cancer, died in Florida in March 2020 of complications from COVID-19, aged 81.