When the Tony-winning Broadway star Gavin Creel was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of cancer, he asked his best friend, fellow Tony-winning actor Celia Keenan-Bolger, to become his end-of-life doula.
Creel was diagnosed with metastatic melanotic peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma in July 2024, and he died two months later, at 48, to the shock and grief of his loved ones and of theater fans who had cheered his acclaimed performances in such shows as Hello, Dolly! and Into the Woods.
“I knew how to take care of him. We both grew up in the Midwest with strong mothers. We had a shared history of 25 years,” Keenan-Bolger tells T&C of the service she provided to Creel. Having met at the University of Michigan, the pair lived together for four years when Keenan-Bolger first moved to New York. “We were like siblings, so the ability to intuit his needs felt very similar to the rest of our lives together.”
Celia Keenan-Bolger and Gavin Creel, both Tony-winning actors, were friends for 25 years before his death in 2024.
Keenan-Bolger, 48, trained to be a death doula in 2022 through INELDA (International End of Life Doula Association). The doulas provide nonmedical, holistic support to people as their lives approach their end, alongside medical staff, friends, and family. At the other end of life, birth doulas provide a corresponding service for moms giving birth.
Last week, Nicole Kidman told an audience at a University of San Francisco speaker series that she began training to become a death doula after her mother died in 2024. “As my mother was passing, she was lonely, and there was only so much the family could provide,” Kidman said, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “Between my sister and I, we have so many children and our careers and our work, and wanting to take care of her because my father wasn’t in the world any more, and that’s when I went, ‘I wish there was these people in the world that were there to sit impartially and just provide solace and care.’”
Other high-profile death doulas include actor Riley Keough and Hamnet director Chloé Zhao, who told the New York Times in January that she was training to become one “because I have been terrified of death my whole life… And because I’ve been so afraid, I haven’t been able to live fully. I haven’t been able to love with my heart open, because I’m so scared of losing love, which is a form of death.”
Nicole Kidman, pictured here at the New York premiere of Margo’s Got Money Troubles in early April, began training to become a death doula after her mother died in 2024.
Keenan-Bolger’s decision to become an end-of-life doula also sprang from personal experiences. Her mother Susan Keenan died in 2001, when Celia was 23, and Celia had long regretted not being able to tell her she had been “a great mom. I felt like I had missed an opportunity there.” When Keenan-Bolger gave birth to her son William in 2015 (with husband John Ellison Conlee), she had a birth doula “who did so much translating about what was happening during the process.”
Two friends whose husbands had terminal diseases told Keenan-Bolger how easy she was to talk to. She read more about death doulas. Bringing life into the world and shepherding life out of it seemed “so similar, yet we have a number of resources for women giving birth and so much less around death.”
A key part of INELDA’s training saw Keenan-Bolger having to meditate on her own mortality. “The first question was, ‘If you were given three months to live, would you want to be alone with this information or talk to people?’ Then, imagining yourself getting sicker: ‘What are you most proud of? What are you leaving behind? Is there anything unfinished, or loose ends to be tied up?’ ”
Hamnet director Chloé Zhao told the New York Times that she decided to become a death doula “because I have been terrified of death my whole life… And because I’ve been so afraid, I haven’t been able to live fully.”
“The gift” of INELDA’s training meant Keenan-Bolger could “fully be” with Creel. “I remember saying to myself, ‘Don’t look away. Stay with him through every single step.’ ” The pair had many conversations, particularly about his legacy “and how we could honor it after he had gone.”
A doula must be careful not to impose her wishes on the dying person, Keenan-Bolger says: “The thing I kept coming back to was, ‘Whatever Gavin wants is what I am in service to.’ ” Similarly, she says, the decision to hire a doula should be made only by the dying person. A doula’s self-care is also important, she says—“to be both deeply present and not absorb everybody else’s grief. Being an actor can be weirdly helpful. We’re used to experiencing things that are not necessarily real, and knowing not to hold on to them.”
The citation for Keenan-Bolger’s 2025 Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award mentioned her end-of-life doula work, and her email signature includes it. Raising the profile of this work, she hopes, will help encourage conversations about death and dying, especially among younger people.
Keenan-Bolger would like to be a death doula for others. “When Gavin died, I said I wanted to do it a hundred more times,” she says. The teachings of spiritual leader Ram Dass resonate for her; as she puts it, “to be in the presence of death is to be in the presence of truth.”
A version of this story appears in the May 2026 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
Teeman is a Senior Editor and Writer at The Daily Beast, and the author of In Bed With Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood and the Private World of an American Master.
