Lin-Manuel Miranda

Lin-Manuel Miranda ( man-WELL; born January 16, 1980) is an American songwriter, actor, filmmaker and librettist. He created the Broadway musicals In the Heights and Hamilton, and the soundtracks for the animated films Moana, Vivo, and Encanto. He has received numerous accolades including a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, three Tony Awards, two Laurence Olivier Awards, two Emmy Awards, and five Grammy Awards, along with nominations for two Academy Awards. He received the Kennedy Center Honor in 2018.

Miranda made his Broadway debut in 2008, writing the music and lyrics for and starring in the musical In the Heights, which won the Tony Award for Best Musical and Best Original Score and the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. It was later adapted as a 2021 film of the same name. Miranda returned to Broadway in 2015, writing the script, music, and lyrics, as well as starring in the musical Hamilton, which was praised by critics and became a popular culture phenomenon. Hamilton won the Pulitzer Prize and was nominated for a record 16 Tonys and won 11, including Miranda's first win for the Best Book of a Musical. The Hamilton cast recording spent 10 weeks atop Billboard's Top Rap Albums chart and became the eleventh-biggest album of the 2010s.

A frequent collaborator of the Walt Disney Company, Miranda has written original songs for the studio. He gained two Oscar nominations for "How Far I'll Go" and "Dos Oruguitas" from Moana and Encanto, respectively. The song "We Don't Talk About Bruno" from Encanto broke various records and marked Miranda's first number-one song on the US Billboard Hot 100 and the UK Singles charts. He starred as Jack in the musical fantasy Mary Poppins Returns (2018), for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe. For his performance in the Disney+ live stage recording of Hamilton released in 2020, he received a Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy nomination. Miranda debuted as a film director with Tick, Tick...Boom!.

His television work includes recurring roles on The Electric Company (2009–2010) and His Dark Materials (2019–2022). Miranda hosted Saturday Night Live in 2016, and had a guest role on Curb Your Enthusiasm in 2018; he was nominated once for the Primetime Emmy. He has been politically active on behalf of Puerto Rico. Miranda met with politicians in 2016 to speak out in favor of debt relief for Puerto Rico and raised funds for rescue efforts and disaster relief after Hurricane Maria in 2017.

Early life and education

Miranda was born on January 16, 1980, in New York City to Luz Towns-Miranda, a clinical psychologist, and Luis Miranda Jr., a political consultant. He is of predominantly Puerto Rican descent and also has distant Mexican, English, and African American ancestry. His parents named him "Lin-Manuel" after a poem about the Vietnam War by Puerto Rican writer José Manuel Torres Santiago entitled "Nana roja para mi hijo Lin Manuel" ("Red Lullaby for My Son Lin Manuel"). Miranda grew up in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan and was raised as a Catholic. During childhood and his teens, Miranda spent at least one month each year with his grandparents in Vega Alta, Puerto Rico. Miranda has one older sister, Luz, who is the Chief Financial Officer of the MirRam Group, a strategic consulting firm in government and communications.

Miranda attended Hunter College Elementary School and Hunter College High School. Among his classmates was Chris Hayes, now a journalist. Hayes was Miranda's first director when he starred in a school play, which was described by Hayes as "a 20-minute musical that featured a maniacal fetal pig in a nightmare that [Miranda] had cut up in biology class". His classmates also included rapper Immortal Technique, who had bullied Miranda, although the two later became friends. Miranda began writing musicals at school.

Miranda wrote the earliest draft of what would become his first Broadway musical, In the Heights, in 1999, during his sophomore year of college at Wesleyan University. After the show was accepted by Wesleyan's student theater company, Second Stage, Miranda added freestyle rap and salsa numbers, and the show was premiered there in 1999. Miranda wrote and directed several other musicals at Wesleyan and acted in many other productions, ranging from musicals to William Shakespeare. He graduated from Wesleyan in 2002.

Career

Theater

2002–2011: In The Heights

In 2002, Miranda and John Buffalo Mailer worked with director Thomas Kail to revise In the Heights. Playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes joined the team in 2004. After premiering in Connecticut in 2005 and opening at the 37 Arts Theater off-Broadway in 2007, the musical went to Broadway, opening in March 2008.

It was nominated for 13 Tonys, winning four, including Best Musical and Best Original Score. It also won the Grammy. Miranda's performance in the leading role of Usnavi earned him a nomination for a Tony. Miranda left the cast of the Broadway production on February 15, 2009.

Miranda reprised the role when the national tour played in Los Angeles from June 23 to July 25, 2010. He again joined the tour in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Miranda rejoined the cast as Usnavi from December 25, 2010, until the production closed on January 9, 2011, after 29 previews and 1,185 regular performances.

Miranda created other work for the stage during this period. He wrote Spanish-language dialogue and worked with Stephen Sondheim to translate into Spanish song lyrics for the 2009 Broadway revival of West Side Story. During this time, he also performed at bar and bat mitzvahs. In 2008, he was invited by composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz to contribute two new songs to a revised version of Schwartz and Nina Faso's 1978 musical Working, which opened in May 2008 at the Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Florida.

During these years, Miranda worked as an English teacher at his former high school, wrote for the Manhattan Times as a columnist and restaurant critic, and composed music for commercials.

In 2003, Miranda co-founded Freestyle Love Supreme, a hip hop improv group that has toured the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, as well as the Aspen, Melbourne and Montreal Comedy festivals. The group created a limited television series for Pivot in 2014 and made its Broadway debut on October 2, 2019, at the Booth Theatre. The self-titled show gained positive reviews.

2011–2014: Bring It On and other theatrical work

Miranda co-wrote the music and lyrics for Bring It On with Tom Kitt and Amanda Green. It premiered at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia in January 2011. The musical began a US national tour on October 30, 2011, in Los Angeles, California. It played a limited engagement on Broadway at the St. James Theatre, beginning previews on July 12, and officially opening on August 1, 2012. It closed on December 30, 2012. It was nominated for Tony Awards in the categories of Best Musical and Best Choreography.

In February 2012, Miranda appeared in Merrily We Roll Along, in the role of Charley, in an Encores! staged concert at New York City Center.

His theatrical achievements in 2014 included an Emmy for the song "Bigger!", which he and Kitt co-wrote for the opening number at the 67th Tony Awards.

Miranda wrote music and lyrics for the one-act musical 21 Chump Street, and performed as narrator for the show's single performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on June 7, 2014. It was broadcast on National Public Radio's This American Life on June 20, 2014. Later that month, he starred in the June 2014 Encores! revival of Jonathan Larson's Tick, Tick... Boom!, under the artistic direction of Jeanine Tesori. The show was directed by Oliver Butler.

Earlier in 2014, he guest starred in a show by comedy duo The Skivvies.

2011–2016: Hamilton

While on vacation in 2008, Lin-Manuel Miranda had read Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton. Inspired by the book, he wrote a rap about Hamilton that he performed for the White House Evening of Poetry, Music, and the Spoken Word on May 12, 2009, accompanied by Alex Lacamoire. Miranda later said he spent a year writing the Hamilton song "My Shot", revising it countless times so that every verse would reflect Alexander Hamilton's intellect. By 2012, Miranda was performing an extended set of pieces based on the life of Hamilton, which he referred to as the Hamilton Mixtape. The New York Times called it "an obvious game changer".