JL
Jonathan Larson
American composer and playwright
1960 – 1996aged 35
Jonathan Larson wrote Rent, reworking the plot of La Boheme into a musical about a group of artists and addicts in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic in 1990s New York. He died of an aortic dissection the night before its first preview performance and never saw the show he had spent years building open; it went on to win three Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and ran on Broadway for twelve years.