American playwright Terrence McNally, one of the first successful writers to trivialize gay characters in the theater, died on Tuesday of complications from the coronavirus, his agent told AFP. He was 81 years old.
"I confirm this heartbreaking news - Terrence McNally has died" at a hospital in Sarasota, Florida, said agent Matt Polk. Terrence McNally, playwright who won four Tony Awards - the Broadway Awards - had previously developed lung cancer, but still suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, said Polk.
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His most famous works include Master Class - a play performed in Paris in 1997, with Fanny Ardant in the spotlight -, the musical comedy Kiss of the Spider Woman or even Ragtime . Openly gay, he has notably written on homophobia and AIDS, as in his play Lips Together, Teeth Apart, played for the first time in 1991. In the early 2000s, his play Corpus Christi, premiered in the United States in 1997, caused a scandal after having toured in several countries: it represented in particular a gay Christ, seduced by Judas.
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Terrence McNally had started writing for Broadway at the age of 23, but did not really become known in the United States until a quarter of a century later, in 1987. "The world needs artists more than ever to remind us of what truth, beauty and kindness really are, " he said in 2019 at the Tony Awards, where he was awarded an award for his entire career.
Terrence McNally is one of the first celebrities to die from the aftermath of the Covid-19, after Manu Dibango, a Cameroonian saxophonist and afro-jazz legend, who died at the age of 86.
