30 Facts About Terrence McNally

Terrence McNally was an American playwright, librettist, and screenwriter.

Terrence McNally was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1996, and he received the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011 and the Lucille Lortel Lifetime Achievement Award.

Terrence McNally's career spanned six decades, and his plays, musicals, and operas were routinely performed all over the world.

Terrence McNally's work centered on the difficulties of and urgent need for human connection.

Terrence McNally was vice-president of the Council of the Dramatists Guild from 1981 to 2001.

Terrence McNally died of complications from COVID-19 on March 24,2020, at Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Florida.

Terrence McNally was born November 3,1938, in St Petersburg, Florida, to Hubert Arthur and Dorothy Katharine Terrence McNally, two transplanted New Yorkers from Irish Catholic backgrounds.

Terrence McNally's parents ran a seaside bar and grill called The Pelican Club, but after a hurricane destroyed the establishment, the family briefly relocated to Port Chester, New York, then to Dallas, Texas, and finally to Corpus Christi, Texas.

Terrence McNally joined the Boar's Head Society and wrote Columbia's annual Varsity Show, which featured music by fellow student Edward L Kleban and directed by Michael P Kahn.

In 1961, Terrence McNally was hired by novelist John Steinbeck to tutor his two teenage sons as the Steinbeck family took a cruise around the world.

Steinbeck asked Terrence McNally to write the libretto for a musical version of the novel East of Eden.

Terrence McNally adapted the play for the motion picture, The Ritz, directed by Richard Lester.

In 1978, Terrence McNally wrote Broadway, Broadway, which failed in its Philadelphia try-out starring Geraldine Page.

Terrence McNally only became truly successful with works such as the off-Broadway production of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune and its screen adaptation with stars Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer.

In 1990, Terrence McNally won an Emmy Award for Best Writing in a Miniseries or Special for Andre's Mother, a drama about a woman coping with her son's death from AIDS.

In 2000, Terrence McNally partnered with composer and lyricist David Yazbek to write the musical The Full Monty, which was directed by Jack O'Brien and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell.

Terrence McNally wrote the libretto for Dead Man Walking, his adaptation of Sister Helen Prejean's book, with a score by Jake Heggie.

The Kennedy Center presented three of Terrence McNally's plays that focus on opera under the heading Nights at the Opera, in March 2010.

In 2001, Terrence McNally started what became a 15-year developmental process towards Broadway with the musical The Visit, for which he wrote the book.

Terrence McNally wrote the libretto for Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life, in 2005, another collaboration with Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, which began at The Old Globe and subsequently transferred to Broadway at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre.

Terrence McNally received a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2019.

Drivas and Terrence McNally broke up as a couple in 1976; they remained close friends until Drivas died of AIDS-related complications ten years later.

Terrence McNally was partnered to Tom Kirdahy, a Broadway producer and a former civil rights attorney for not-for-profit AIDS organizations, following a civil union ceremony in Vermont on December 20,2003.

Terrence McNally relates that while attending a party in 1980 he spilled a drink on Lauren Bacall.

Terrence McNally was someone I revered, and she said this with such love and concern.

Terrence McNally died at Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Sarasota, Florida, on March 24,2020, at the age of 81, from complications of COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Terrence McNally had previously overcome lung cancer in the late 1990s that cost him portions of both his lungs due to the disease, and he was living with COPD at the time of his death.

Terrence McNally donated his papers to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Terrence McNally had previously deposited his papers at the University of Michigan.

Terrence McNally: Every Act of Life, a documentary about McNally's life and career, aired on PBS on June 14,2019, as part of their American Masters series.