Biography
Rupert Holmes is the first person in theatrical history to singly win Tony awards as a playwright, a lyricist, and a composer. He has won identical honors from the New York Drama Desk, with a fourth award in their additional category for his orchestrations. His works for Broadway include The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which won the Tony award for Best Musical and had a critically-acclaimed Broadway revival by the Roundabout Theatre Company in 2012-2013. His script for Curtains, with a score by the legendary team of Kander and Ebb, won Holmes an additional Drama Desk award for Best Book while receiving two further Tony nominations for Book and Lyrics.
Say Goodnight Gracie, his "dramedy" about the life of comedian George Burns, earned Holmes the National Broadway Theatre Award for Best Play and a sixth Tony nomination for Best Play. He has twice received the coveted "Edgar" Award from the Mystery Writers of America for his stage thrillers, which include: the Broadway suspense-comedy Accomplice starring Jason Alexander and Michael McKean, which has since been seen around the country and the world, including a recent production at China's Shanghai Theater; and Solitary Confinement, a tour de force for actor Stacy Keach which broke all existing box office records at the Kennedy Center and Pasadena Playhouse, and also enjoyed a limited run on Broadway. His musical of Jerry Lewis's classic The Nutty Professor, with book and lyrics by Holmes and music by the late Marvin Hamlisch, received eight BroadwayWorld Theatre Awards in 2013 including Best Musical and (to Hamlisch and Holmes) Best Original New Work. His first Random House novel, Where the Truth Lies, received a Nero Wolfe award nomination for Best American Mystery Novel and became a motion picture starring Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon, while his second novel Swing reached #24 of all books on Amazon and was a San Francisco Chronicle Top Ten bestseller. He also created and wrote AMC's critically-acclaimed TV series Remember WENN. A Time To Kill, based on the American classic (and one of the best-selling novels of all time) marks the first work by the astoundingly popular John Grisham to be adapted for the stage, and was created by Rupert Holmes with the approval and endorsement of its author.
