American playwright and director Matthew López was BOTD in 1977. Born in Panama City, Florida to Puerto Rican parents, he moved to New York in his 20s to pursue playwriting, and was mentored by Terrence McNally. His first produced play, the Civil War drama The Whipping Man, debuted off-Broadway in 2006, enjoying a lengthy run and winning several theatre prizes. His 2011 play Somewhere, partially inspired by the film West Side Story, chronicled a Latin American family in late-1950s New York whose neighbourhood is destroyed to make way for the construction of the Lincoln Centre. López returned to Off-Broadway with The Legend of Georgia McBride, a rollicking comedy about an unsuccessful Elvis impersonator who reignites his career by becoming a drag queen. His 2015 play Reverberation, about a young gay New Yorker suffering from agoraphobia (and drawing on López’s experiences with alcoholism), had a limited run in regional theatre. He is best known for his 2018 play The Inheritance, a two-part seven-hour epic about gay life in contemporary New York, inspired by E. M. Forster‘s novel Howard’s End. First produced in London and directed by Stephen Daldry, it was an unexpected critical and commercial success, transferring to the West End and winning the Olivier Award for Best Play. The production transferred to Broadway in 2019 and became a box-office hit, praised as the most significant gay-themed play since Tony Kushner‘s Angels in America. The production won four Tony Awards, with López becoming the first Latin-American playwright to win Best Play. He collaborated with Marc Shaiman on the 2022 musical adaptation of the film Some Like It Hot, in which the Jack Lemmon character comes out as a trans woman, winning a Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical. In 2023, López adapted and directed the film adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s novel Red, White and Royal Blue, imagining a love affair between the son of the American President and a British royal prince. Opening to mixed reviews, it became the most-watched film on Amazon’s global platform for three weeks, with López commissioned to write and direct a sequel. López currently lives in London. His future projects include a remake of 1990s romance The Bodyguard, and a biopic about playwright Tennessee Williams‘ relationship with Frank Merlo.