Gavin Creel, an award-winning Broadway star and marriage equality activist, has died at the age of 48.

He died of metastatic melanotic peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma, a rare form of cancer. The New York Times reports. His partner, partner, Alex Temple Ward, announced Creel’s death through a publicist. Creel died Monday at his home in Manhattan.

“Mr. Creel was a beloved member of the New York theater community whose death comes as a shock given his age Times notes. He performed last winter Walk On: Confessions of a Museum Beginner, a show he wrote about his experiences at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at the MCC Theater off-Broadway.

An Ohio native, Creel made his Broadway debut in 2002 as Jimmy Smith, the love interest for Sutton Foster’s Millie, in the 1920s musical. Thoroughly modern Millie. He received his first Tony Award nomination for that performance. He was nominated again for the revival of Her in 2009 and won the award as Lead Actor in a Musical for his role as Cornelius Hackl, a small-town store clerk looking for love and adventure in New York City, in the 2017 production Hello, Dolly!, starring Bette Midler. He also received the Drama Desk Award for that show.

His other Broadway roles include Jean-Michel, a straight man raised by a gay couple, in the 2004-2005 revival. La Cage aux Folles; Elder Price The Book of Mormon in 2015-2016, after playing the role on tour; and Cinderella’s Prince and the Wolf In the forest, also on tour, in 2022-2023. He also performed The Book of Mormon in London, where he won the Olivier Award.

He had a number of television roles, including the lead role with Matt Bomer Rubber(woman)man, part of Ryan Murphy’s American horror stories series, in 2021. They played a gay couple who move into a haunted house with their teenage daughter.

In 2011, with a marriage equality bill pending in New York State, Creel and other Broadway performers appeared in a video for the Human Rights Campaign’s New Yorkers for Marriage Equality series. He and fellow Broadway star Rory O’Malley had founded a pro-equality organization, Broadway Impact. The bill eventually became law.

He came out in a Supporter interview in 2009 while appearing in Her. “I also want to be able to get married legally, and there’s no point in parading around trying to achieve marriage equality when I’m not open about who I am,” he said. The lawyer at the time. “It doesn’t inspire young men and women who are struggling with their own sexuality to be confident in who they are if I’m not confident in who I am. And when I whisper about it, I give other people the power to whisper about it, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”