Larry Kramer Net Worth | Celebrity Net Worth

What Was Larry Kramer’s Net Worth?

Larry Kramer was an American author, playwright, public health advocate, and gay rights activist who had a net worth of $3 million. Larry Kramer passed away from pneumonia on May 27, 2020, at the age of 84. Kramer started off rewriting scripts for Columbia Pictures and then moved to London to work for United Artists. Kramer wrote the movies “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush,” “Women in Love,” and “Lost Horizon.” He also wrote the HBO movie “The Normal Heart,” which won a Humanitas Prize and a Primetime Emmy. He was nominated for an Academy Award and BAFTA Award for “Women in Love .” He has authored the books or plays “Sissies’ Scrapbook” (aka “Four Friends”), “A Minor Dark Age,” “The Normal Heart,” “Just Say No,” “A Play about a Farce,” “The Furniture of Home,” “The Destiny of Me,” “Faggots,” “The American People Volume 1,” “Search for My Heart,” “Reports From the Holocaust: The Story of an AIDS Activist,” and “The Tragedy of Today’s Gays.” He established the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power in 1987.

Early Life

Larry Kramer was born Laurence David Kramer on June 25, 1935, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He was the son of Rea and George Kramer, and he had an older brother named Arthur. Rea was a teacher, a shoe store employee, and a social worker for the humanitarian organization the Red Cross, and George was a government attorney. Larry grew up in a Jewish household, and his parents considered him an “unwanted child” and struggled during the Great Depression. After the family moved to Maryland, they were in a lower socioeconomic bracket than many of Kramer’s classmates. Larry attended Woodrow Wilson High School, then he enrolled at Yale University. He was lonely there, and feeling like he was the “only gay student on campus,” he attempted to end his life by overdosing on aspirin. The experience led to Kramer wanting to explore his sexuality and fight “for gay people’s worth.” During his next semester of college, Larry began an affair with one of his professors. He earned an English degree in 1957, then he served in the U.S. Army Reserve.

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Career

When Kramer was 23, he began working at Columbia Pictures as a Teletype operator. The studio’s story department later hired him to rework scripts, and he earned his first writing credit as a dialogue writer on the 1968 film “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.” Next, Larry wrote the screenplay for the 1969 film “Women in Love,” which was an adaptation of the 1920 D. H. Lawrence novel of the same name. The film earned four Academy Award nominations, including a Best Screenplay – Based on Material from Another Medium nomination for Kramer. It also received 11 BAFTA Award nominations, with Larry earning a nomination for Best Screenplay. Larry wrote the screenplay for the 1973 film “Lost Horizon,” and he told SF Weekly in 2017, “The only thing I’m truly ashamed of is how I was talked into writing the musical version of Frank Capra’s ‘Lost Horizon.’ But in an ironic way I was paid so much money to do it, because I didn’t want to do it, and the more I said, ‘No,’ the more they offered me.” Kramer then wrote the play “Sissies’ Scrapbook” (1973), which was later retitled “Four Friends.” Larry said that the play was about “cowardice and the inability of some men to grow up, leave the emotional bondage of male collegiate camaraderie, and assume adult responsibilities.” In 1978, he released the novel “Faggots,” a “fierce satire of the gay ghetto and a touching story of one man’s desperate search for permanence, commitment, and love.” The book became one of the best-selling gay novels in history.

In 1985, Kramer’s play “The Normal Heart” premiered at The Public Theater in New York City. The play is about the AIDS epidemic, and it “tells the story of very private lives caught up in the heartrendering ordeal of suffering and doom – an ordeal that was largely ignored for reasons of politics and majority morality.” “The Normal Heart” moved to Broadway in 2011, and it won three Tony Awards, including Best Revival of a Play. In 2014, the play was adapted into an Emmy-winning HBO movie. Larry wrote the screenplay, and the movie was directed by Ryan Murphy and starred Mark Ruffalo, Matt Bomer, Julia Roberts, Jim Parsons, and Taylor Kitsch. Ned Weeks, the main character of “The Normal Heart,” returned in the 1992 play “The Destiny of Me,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In 1989, Kramer released the nonfiction book “Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist,” followed by 2005’s “The Tragedy of Today’s Gays.” He also published the fiction books “The American People Volume 1, Search for My Heart” (2015) and “The American People: Volume 2, The Brutality of Fact” (2020).

Personal Life and Death

Larry married architectural designer David Webster on July 24, 2013, after decades together. The wedding took place at the NYU Langone Medical Center ICU, where Kramer was recovering from surgery. The couple remained together until Larry’s death in 2020. In 1988, Kramer underwent surgery for a congenital hernia, and doctors discovered that his liver was damaged due to hepatitis B. This led to Larry learning that he was HIV-positive. In 2001, he needed a liver transplant, but Mount Sinai Hospital’s organ transplant department turned him down because HIV-positive individuals were considered inappropriate candidates due to of the perception that their lifespans would be shorter. In June 2001, Newsweek reported that Kramer was dying, and six months later, his death was erroneously reported by the Associated Press. In May 2001, he was accepted by the University of Pittsburgh’s Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute as potential transplant recipient, and in December 2001, he received a new liver. In April 2019, he broke his leg. On May 27, 2020, Larry passed away from pneumonia at the age of 84.

Awards and Nominations

In 1970, Kramer received an Academy Award nomination for Writing Adapted Screenplay for “Women in Love.” In 1993, “The Destiny of Me” earned him two Obie Awards and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. In 1996, Larry won an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Public Service Award from Common Cause. In 1999, the National Theatre of Great Britain named “The Normal Heart” one of the “Hundred Best Plays of the 20th Century.” Kramer was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2005, and the following year, Equality Forum named him an icon of LGBT History Month. “The Normal Heart” was named Best Revival of a Play at the 2011 Tony Awards, and in 2012, Larry began a Montgomery Fellowship at Dartmouth College. In 2013, the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Awards named him a Master American Dramatist, and in 2014, he earned a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries, Movie or a Dramatic Special for “The Normal Heart.” In 2015, Gay Men’s Health Crisis honored him with the first-ever Larry Kramer Activism Award. In 2020, he was added to the Stonewall National Monument’s National LGBTQ Wall of Honor, which recognizes “pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes.”