14 Facts About Charles Ludlam

Charles Braun Ludlam was an American actor, director, and playwright.

Charles Ludlam was raised in Greenlawn, New York, and attended Harborfields High School.

Charles Ludlam was openly gay, and performed in plays with the Township Theater Group, a community theatre in Huntington, and worked backstage at the Red Barn Theater, a summer stock theatre in Northport.

Charles Ludlam received a degree in dramatic literature from Hofstra University in 1964.

At Hofstra, Charles Ludlam met Black-Eyed Susan, whom he cast in one of his college productions.

Charles Ludlam joined John Vaccaro's Play-House of the Ridiculous, and after a falling out, founded his own Ridiculous Theatrical Company in 1967.

Charles Ludlam's first plays were rudimentary exercises; starting with Bluebeard, he began writing more structured plays, which were often pastiches of gothic novels; works by Federico Garcia Lorca, Shakespeare, and Richard Wagner; and popular culture and old movies.

Charles Ludlam's Bluebeard was produced at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, where Vaccaro's company was in residence, in March 1970.

Charles Ludlam won fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Ford Foundations, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Charles Ludlam won six Obie Awards over the course of his career, including a Sustained Excellence Obie Award two weeks before his death in 1987, and won the Rosamund Gilder Award for distinguished achievement in the theater in 1986.

Charles Ludlam often appeared in his plays, and was particularly noted for his female roles.

Charles Ludlam wrote one of the first plays to address, though indirectly, the AIDS epidemic.

Charles Ludlam attempted to fight the disease with his lifelong interest in healthy eating and a macrobiotic diet, but died a month after his AIDS diagnosis, of PCP pneumonia, at St Vincent's Hospital.

In 2009, Charles Ludlam was inducted posthumously into the American Theater Hall of Fame.