Award-winning gay Broadway actor and activist Gavin Creel has died aged 48

Gavin Creel, an award-winning Broadway star and marriage equality activist, has died at the age of 48.

He died of metastatic melanotic peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma, a rare type of cancer. The New York Times Reports. His partner, partner Alex Temple Ward, announced Creel’s death through a publicist. Creel died Monday at his home in Manhattan.

“Mr. “Creel was a popular member of the New York theater scene whose death comes as a shock given his age,” the said Just Notes. He only performed there last winter Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Newcomer, a show he wrote about his experiences at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at Broadway’s MCC Theater.

Ohio native Creel made his Broadway debut in 2002 as Jimmy Smith, the lover of Sutton Foster’s Millie, in the 1920s-set musical Thoroughly modern Millie. For this performance he received his first Tony Award nomination. He was nominated again for the revival of hair in 2009 and won the award for Lead Actor in a Musical for his role as Cornelius Hackl, a small-town store clerk looking for love and adventure in New York City, in the 2017 production Hello, Dolly! in which Bette Midler played the lead role. He also received the Drama Desk Award for this show.

His other Broadway roles include Jean-Michel, a straight man raised by a gay couple, in the revival of ” La Cage aux Folles; Elder Price enters The Book of Mormon 2015–2016, after playing the role on tour; and Cinderella’s Prince and the Wolf in Into the forest, Also on tour, in 2022-2023. He also appeared in The Book of Mormon in London and won the Olivier Award.

He has had several television roles, including starring opposite Matt Bomer in ” rubber man, Part by Ryan Murphy American horror stories series in 2021. They played a gay couple who move into a haunted house with their teenage daughter.

In 2011, when marriage equality legislation was pending in New York State, Creel and other Broadway performers appeared in a video for the Human Rights Campaign’s “New Yorkers for Marriage Equality” series. He and his Broadway colleague Rory O’Malley had founded an equality organization called Broadway Impact. The bill eventually became law.

He came out in one advocate Interview in 2009 during his appearance in Hair. “Plus, I want to have the opportunity to get married legally, and it makes no sense for me to strut around trying to achieve marriage equality without being open about who I am,” he said The lawyer at the time. “It doesn’t inspire young men and women who are struggling with their own sexuality to be confident in who they are when I’m not confident. And if I whisper about it, then I’m giving other people the power to whisper about it, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”