Harry Haun, Influential Broadway Journalist and TheaterMania Contributor, Dies at 85

Veteran arts journalist Harry Haun, a longtime contributor to this and many other publications, has died at 85 following a battle with congestive heart failure.

Haun’s five-decade journalism career took him from paper boy in his native Greenville, Texas, to newspaper editor in New York City. He spent 17 years covering the arts at the New York Daily News as the paper’s amusements editor, where he also penned the weekly Q&A column Ask Mr. Entertainment and contributed numerous critic-at-large pieces on theater and film. He was particularly in his element when filling in for Liz Smith’s famed gossip column during her absences.

He was best known for his long association with Playbill, where his monthly columns On the Aisle and Theatregoer’s Notebook became must-reads for Broadway insiders. A fixture at opening nights, he was renowned for filing his pun-laced, gossip-rich dispatches with remarkable speed, appearing like clockwork within hours of the party ending.

An avid film buff, Haun authored The Movie Quote Book, a compendium of over 4,000 quotes from 500 films, organized by subject-matter, and The Cinematic Century, a day-by-day compilation of movie facts that span the whole of the 20th century.

But theater was Haun’s true love and his knowledge of the medium was encyclopedic, the product of a lifetime spent in dark rooms consuming the art form. Even in declining health, he still managed to see a show every night of the week (twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays), serving as the proverbial canary in the coal mine for his beloved Outer Critics Circle, where he served as historian and nominator for decades. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the organization in 2024.

Haun’s abiding wish was to never retire, and he didn’t. As a contributor to TheaterMania, he was still pitching us story ideas as recently as December 2025, and he was still out seeing shows and cabaret performances until days before his hospital stay began. We are honored to have published one of his final columns, which examines the making of the Oscar-nominated Lorenz Hart biopic Blue Moon, a subject that perfectly united his twin passions for theater and cinema.

His survivors include his husband, Charles Nelson. The couple married in 2011 on the third floor of Angus McIndoe’s restaurant on West 44th Street, in a ceremony befitting theater royalty.