Terrence McNally

American playwright, librettist, and screenwriter who received the Tony Award for Best Play for Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class, as well as the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical for Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime.

He was a 2018 inductee of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The honor of election is considered the highest form of recognition of artistic merit in the United States. His other accolades include an Emmy Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, four Drama Desk Awards, two Lucille Lortel Awards, two Obie Awards, and three Hull-Warriner Awards. He was a recipient of the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award as well as the Lucille Lortel Lifetime Achievement Award.

In addition to his award-winning plays and musicals, he also wrote two operas, multiple screenplays, teleplays, and a memoir. His career spanned six decades, and his plays, musicals, and operas are routinely performed all over the world.

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 20 December 2003. They subsequently married in Washington, D.C. on 6 April 2010. In celebration of the Supreme Court's decision to legalize same-sex marriage in all 50 states, they renewed their vows at New York City Hall with Mayor Bill de Blasio officiating on 26 June 2015.

McNally, who had previously overcome lung cancer, died in Sarasota, Florida on 24 March 2020 at age 81 from complications of Coronavirus disease 2019 during the COVID-19 pandemic.