Born in Bal­ti­more in 1950, Howard Elliott Ash­man (on left) stud­ied at God­dard Col­lege and Boston Uni­ver­sity before receiv­ing his grad­u­ate degree from Indi­ana Uni­ver­sity. He wrote sev­eral plays in the 1970s, and became artis­tic direc­tor of New York’s WPA The­atre in 1977.

In 1979, Ash­man part­nered up with Alan Mencken to write a musi­cal ver­sion of Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rose­wa­ter. Ash­man and Mencken achieved great suc­cess with their musi­cal adap­ta­tion of Lit­tle Shop of Hor­rors (1982), which won numer­ous awards and holds the record as the third-longest run­ning off-Broadway show and the highest-earning off-Broadway show in history.

Ash­man and Menken wrote the music for Disney’s ani­mated fea­ture films The Lit­tle Mer­maid (1989), and Beauty and the Beast (1991). Their work earned two Golden Globe Award, two Grammy Awards, and two Oscars.

Ash­man suc­cumbed to com­pli­ca­tions of AIDS at the age of 40 dur­ing the pro­duc­tion of Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin.