Edward
Martino Crowley (August
21, 1935 – March 7, 2020) was an American playwright best known for his 1968
play The Boys in the Band.
Crowley was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi.
After graduating from The Catholic University of
America (studying acting and show business) in Washington, D.C. in 1957, Crowley headed west to Hollywood, where he worked for a number of television
production companies before meeting Natalie Wood on the set of her film Splendor in the Grass. Wood hired him as her assistant, primarily to
give him ample free time to work on his gay-themed play The Boys in the Band, which
opened off-Broadway on April
14, 1968 and enjoyed a run of 1,000 performances. Crowley became part of Wood's
inner circle of friends that she called "the nucleus", whose main
requirement was that they pass a "kindness" test. The Boys in the Band was
adapted into a film in 1970 directed by William Friedkin. Crowley's 2002 sequel to The Boys in
the Band was entitled The Men from the Boys.
In 2018 Boys in the Band was restaged on Broadway in a 50th anniversary revival featuring Matt Bomer, Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto, and Andrew Rannells. Crowley
also wrote and produced Remote Asylum and the
autobiographical A Breeze from the Gulf. In 1979 and 1980, Crowley
served first as the executive script editor and then producer of the ABC series Hart to Hart, starring Wood's husband Robert Wagner
and Stefanie Powers. His other
credits include the teleplays for There Must Be a Pony (1986), Bluegrass (1988), People
Like Us (1990), and a reunion special of Hart to Hart in
1996. Crowley appeared in at least four documentaries: The Celluloid Closet (1995),
about the depiction of homosexuality in cinema; Dominick Dunne: After the
Party (2007), a biography of Crowley's friend and
producer Dominick Dunne; Making
the Boys (2011), a documentary about the making of The Boys in
the Band; and The Boys in the Band: Something Personal (2020),
a documentary about the Netflix remake of the movie. Crowley was openly gay. Crowley
died in Manhattan on March 7, 2020. He suffered a heart attack,
after which he underwent open-heart surgery and died while recovering.