One of the most widely celebrated playwrights and theatrical lyricists of his generation, Howard Ashman earned a place in history with his songs for stage and screen. Born in Baltimore in 1950, Ashman was an actor in his youth, but he pursued a career as a playwright. He began collaborating with composer Alan Menken in the late ’70s; they found their first success with the quirky horror-comedy Little Shop of Horrors, which debuted off-Broadway in 1982 with Ashman as director, writer and lyricist, and later became a hit movie. Ashman’s name became inextricably linked to Disney when he wrote the richly witty lyrics for the blockbuster animated films The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Aladdin (1992) shortly before his 1991 passing.