Tony Award-winning writer of Annie, Thomas Meehan, 88

Three-time Tony Award-winning writer Thomas Meehan, who transformed the Little Orphan Annie cartoon strip into the smash Broadway musical Annie, has died.

Me eh an ,88, passed away a this home in Manhattan.

Long-time friend and Annie collaborator Martin Charnin said: “There’s a hole in my heart. It’s a gigantic loss, not only to the industry but also to us.”

Meehan wrote the books for three shows that ran more than 2,000 performances on Broadway – Annie, The Producers and Hairspray.

“I wrote stories that were serious, very sombre, trying to be in the style of William Faulkner,” Meehan said in 1999. “My career has always been that every time I try something really serious it’s no good, but if I try to be funny, then it works.”

Meehan’s other shows include Young Frankenstein with Brooks, Cry-Baby with O’Donnell, Elf with Bob Martin, Chaplin with Christopher Curtis, Bombay Dreams with Meera Syal and the musical Rocky with Sylvester Stallone.

He began his career as a writer with The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section and earned an Emmy Award nomination in 1964 as one of the writers of the TV series That Was The Week That Was.

“He was somebody who you could literally call a wit,” Charnin said.

Meehan made his Broadway debut with Annie, alongside Charnin and songwriter Charles Strouse.

The 1977 original won the Tony as best musical and ran for 2,300 performances, inspiring tours and revivals that never went out of style.

Annie almost died at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut in 1976, but Charnin revised the show and with actress Andrea McArdle replacing Kristen Vigard as red-haired moppet Annie and Dorothy Loudon added as Miss Hannigan, the production went on to open in New York in April 1977 with a bang.

Thomas Meehan.