Jonathan Morano, a longtime writer for The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, has died.
Deadline reports that Morano passed away peacefully on Thursday, June 20 in Los Angeles following a 15-month-long battle with Glioblastoma, or GBM, an aggressive primary brain cancer. Morano’s wife, Aimee Blisten, announced the news. The award-winning writer was 56 years old.
Morano joined The Late Late Show as a writer in 2005, and remained there for a decade. During that time he was elevated to writing supervisor and then head writer. While Ferguson left The Late Late Show in December 2014, Morano remained on staff for the show’s guest-hosted era in early 2015, before James Corden took over the franchise.
Morano’s accomplishments during his run on The Late Late Show included a prestigious Peabody Award win for the show’s 2009 episode featuring Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The Peabody Awards lauded the episode for “proving that one of the silliest hours on television (what with the trademark hand puppets and skeleton robots) could also be one of the smartest.”
Morano also wrote for Ferguson when the comic hosted the 32nd Annual People’s Choice Awards in 2006 and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2008. The pair worked together on comedy specials as well.
Prior to working on The Late Late Show, Morano won a grant and fellowship from Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Film Institute in 2003 for a dramatic screenplay titled Benjamin Garrett.
Morano was born in St. Helens, Merseyside, England on December 23, 1967, but moved to the U.S. with his family, who settled in Oklahoma, when Morano was 12 years old. It was while living in the Sooner State that Morano got his first exposure to Hollywood when he was cast in a small role in Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of The Outsiders, playing “the kid sitting behind Diane Lane at the drive-in.”
Prior to his passing, Morano shared that the last years of his life were also the happiest years of his life, as he was “surrounded by the love of his wife and soulmate Aimee Blisten, along with film, art, literature, their friends, their faith, and their two French bulldogs.”
I am such an ardent fan of Ferguson’s run on the Late Late Show… it was formative to me, yet up until today, I didn’t even know Jonathan’s name! But now I can happily call myself a fan of Jonathan Morano’s work. Thank you for sharing his story. I hope Ferguson’s LSSS one day gets the kind of BTS material that Letterman and Conan are getting nowadays, because I love hearing stories about it. Not a day goes by where I don’t miss seeing Craig every morning,-because I lived in Brazil, and so I had to deal with both time-zones and VPNs to watch it. But it was worth it. Thank you Jonathan for all the years of joy, RIP!