Howard Ashman earned his greatest renown as a lyricist, playwright, and theater director through his long-running creative alliance with composer Alan Menken. Together they supplied the songs for the 1982 off-Broadway hit Little Shop of Horrors as well as the Disney features The Little Mermaid (1989) and Beauty and the Beast (1991), yet Ashman’s Oscar- and Grammy-winning body of work ended abruptly when he died in 1991 at forty.
Born Howard Elliott Ashman in Baltimore on May 17, 1950, he first attended Boston University and then completed a master’s degree at Indiana University in 1974. After moving to New York City he took a publishing position while continuing to write plays on the side. His musical adaptation of The Tempest, titled Dreamstuff, received a production at the WPA Theatre, where he served as artistic director between 1976 and 1982. Ashman’s first project with Menken was the 1979 musical God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, drawn from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel; the pair reunited for Little Shop of Horrors in 1982. That show, an updated version of Roger Corman’s 1960 cult film, became the highest-grossing off-Broadway production of its era, secured the New York Drama Critics Award and the Drama Desk Award, and, in its 1986 screen adaptation, earned the songwriting team an Academy Award nomination for the newly written “Mean Green Mother from Outer Space.” Ashman next supplied lyrics for the 1986 Broadway musical Smile, whose score was composed by Marvin Hamlisch; he also directed the production and was nominated for a Tony Award for his book.
The 1988 Disney animated feature Oliver & Company included the song “Once Upon a Time in New York City,” which Ashman wrote with Barry Mann and which Huey Lewis performed. The number opened the door to his work on Disney’s first animated fairy-tale feature since Sleeping Beauty (1959). For The Little Mermaid (1989) Ashman and Menken received an Academy Award for “Under the Sea,” which prevailed over their own “Kiss the Girl.” The soundtrack brought them two Grammys—one for Best Recording for Children and another for Best Song Written Specifically for a Motion Picture or Television. Two years later their title song for Beauty and the Beast earned a second Oscar; “Be Our Guest” and “Belle” were likewise nominated in the Best Original Song category, while the writing team collected two additional Grammys for the song “Beauty and the Beast” and for the soundtrack album. Having been diagnosed with AIDS in 1988, Ashman died on March 14, 1991, after he and Menken had already completed three songs for the 1992 Disney film Aladdin; one of those numbers, “Friend Like Me,” later received a seventh Oscar nomination for Best Original Song.
In subsequent decades Ashman received further honors when Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, and Aladdin all reached Broadway in successful stage adaptations. Posthumous Tony Award nominations for Best Original Score arrived in 1994, 2008, and 2014 for the respective shows. The documentary Howard, which chronicles his life, premiered at film festivals in 2018 and became available on streaming platforms in 2020. For the 2023 live-action The Little Mermaid, Menken and Lin-Manuel Miranda contributed four new songs that appeared alongside selected earlier numbers by Menken and Ashman; the film was dedicated to Ashman.
