Terrence McNally (1938-2020) was an American playwright, librettist, and screenwriter. He 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. In all, he won five Tony awards. His other accolades included an Emmy Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, four Drama Desk Awards, two Lucille Lortel Awards, two Obie Awards, three Hull-Warriner Awards, and a citation from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was a recipient of the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award as well as the Lucille Lortel Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2016, the Lotos Club honored McNally at their annual "State Dinner," which has previously honored such luminaries as W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, George M. Cohan, Moss Hart, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Saul Bellow, and Arthur Miller.
He graduated from W.B. Ray High School in Corpus Christi, TX in 1956 and enrolled at Columbia University where he went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in English in 1960. It was a particularly vibrant time for Broadway, and according to The New York Times, McNally recalled heading out on his first night in New York expecting to walk up to the box office and buy a ticket to My Fair Lady, a smash hit that had recently opened starring Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison. Told that the show was sold out for months, he walked a few blocks south and saw Gwen Verdon in Damn Yankees instead.
His first Broadway play, a 1965 bomb called And Things That Go Bump in the Night, featured a romance between two men and it was panned. He had two other Broadway credits, Morning, Noon and Night in 1968 and two one-acts called Bad Habits in 1974, before scoring a hit with The Ritz.
In addition to his award-winning plays and musicals, he also wrote two operas, multiple screenplays, teleplays, and a memoir. He was a member of the Council of the Dramatists Guild, joining in 1970, and served as vice-president from 1981 to 2001, and was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1996. In 1998, McNally was awarded an honorary degree from The Juilliard School in recognition for reviving The Lily Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program with the playwright, John Guare. In 2013, he returned to his alma mater, Columbia University, where he was the keynote speaker of the graduating class of 2013 on Class Day. He was a 2018 inductee of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2019 he received the Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre.
