seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Category Archives: Film, Radio, & Television


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Birth of Actor Patrick Joseph McGoohan

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Patrick Joseph McGoohan, American-born actor who is raised in Ireland and Great Britain, is born in Astoria, Queens, New York on March 19, 1928. He establishes an extensive stage and film career.

McGoohan is the son of Rose (Fitzpatrick) and Thomas McGoohan, who are living in the United States after emigrating from Ireland to seek work. He is brought up as a Catholic. Shortly after he is born, his parents move back to Mullaghmore, County Leitrim. Seven years later they emigrate to Sheffield, England.

McGoohan attends St. Vincent’s School and De La Salle College in Sheffield. During World War II, he is evacuated to Loughborough, Leicestershire. There he attends Ratcliffe College, where he excels in mathematics and boxing. He leaves school at the age of 16 and returns to Sheffield, where he works as a chicken farmer, a bank clerk, and a lorry driver before getting a job as a stage manager at Sheffield Repertory Theatre. When one of the actors becomes ill, McGoohan is substituted for him, launching his acting career.

McGoohan is most closely identified with two 1960s British television series, Danger Man and The Prisoner. The espionage drama Danger Man, which runs in the United States as Secret Agent, runs for 86 episodes during 1960–1961 and 1964–1967. The cult hit The Prisoner runs for 17 episodes in 1967–1968.

In Danger Man McGoohan puts a new spin on the secret agent formula by refusing to allow his character, John Drake, to carry a gun or indulge in sexual dalliances. The show’s success makes him Britain’s highest-paid TV actor.

McGoohan is one of several actors considered for the role of James Bond in Dr. No. While McGoohan turns down the role on moral grounds, the success of the Bond films is generally cited as the reason for Danger Man being revived in 1964. He is later considered for the Bond role in Live and Let Die but again turns it down.

The success of Danger Man provides McGoohan the leverage he needs to produce The Prisoner, an allegorical Kafkaesque series in which he portrays Number Six, an unnamed agent, thought by many to represent Drake, who angrily resigns and is then held captive in a superficially banal place called The Village, where the mysterious unseen Number One, the ever-changing Number Two, and others try to overcome the fiercely individualistic Number Six’s escape attempts and pry information from him.

McGoohan’s later works include the short-lived medical mystery series Rafferty (1977), such films as Ice Station Zebra (1968), Escape from Alcatraz (1979), and Braveheart (1995), the Broadway spy drama Pack of Lies (1985), and a record four guest-villain appearances on the American detective series Columbo, two of which earned him Emmy Awards. He also directs and writes several episodes of The Prisoner and Columbo. One of his last roles is as Number Six in a 2000 episode of the animated TV comedy The Simpsons.

Patrick McGoohan dies on January 13, 2009, at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California, following a brief illness. His body is cremated.


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Neil Jordan Receives Silver Bear for Best Director

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Neil Patrick Jordan, director of The Butcher Boy (1997), is awarded a Silver Bear for Best Director at the 48th Berlin International Film Festival on February 22, 1998.

Jordan is born in County Sligo on February 25, 1950. His first book, Night in Tunisia, wins a Somerset Maugham Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979. He also wins an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Crying Game (1992).

Jordan is educated at St. Paul’s College, Raheny. Later, Jordan attends University College Dublin, where he studies Irish history and English literature. He is raised a Catholic and is quite religious during the early stages of his life. Regarding his current beliefs, he states that “God is the greatest imaginary being of all time. Along with Einstein‘s General Theory of Relativity, the invention of God is probably the greatest creation of human thought.”

When John Boorman is filming Excalibur in Ireland, he recruits Jordan as a “creative associate.” A year later Boorman is executive producer on Jordan’s first feature, Angel, a tale of a musician caught up in the Troubles, starring Stephen Rea who subsequently appears in almost all of Jordan’s films to date. During the 1980s, he directs films that win him acclaim, including The Company of Wolves and Mona Lisa, both made in England. The Company of Wolves becomes a cult favorite.

As a writer/director, Jordan has a highly idiosyncratic body of work, ranging from mainstream hits like Interview with the Vampire to commercial failures like We’re No Angels to a variety of more personal, low-budget arthouse pictures. He is also the driving force behind the cable TV series The Borgias.

Unconventional sexual relationships are a recurring theme in Jordan’s work, and he often finds a sympathetic side to characters that audiences would traditionally consider deviant or downright horrifying. His film The Miracle, for instance, follows two characters who struggle to resist a strong, incestuous attraction, while The Crying Game makes complicated, likable characters out of an IRA volunteer and a transgender woman. Interview with the Vampire, like the Anne Rice book it is based on, focuses on the intense, intimate interpersonal relationship of two undead men who murder humans nightly, accompanied by an equally lusty vampire woman who is eternally trapped in the body of a little girl. While Lestat (Tom Cruise) is depicted in an attractive but villainous manner, his partner Louis (Brad Pitt) and the child vampire Claudia (Kirsten Dunst) are meant to capture the audience’s sympathy despite their predatory nature.

In addition to the unusual sexuality of Jordan’s films, he frequently returns to the Troubles of Northern Ireland. The Crying Game and Breakfast on Pluto both concern a transgender character, both concern the Troubles, and both feature frequent Jordan leading man Stephen Rea. The two films, however, are very different, with The Crying Game being a realistic thriller/romance and Breakfast on Pluto a much more episodic, stylized, darkly comic biography. Jordan also frequently tells stories about children or young people, such as The Miracle and The Butcher Boy. While his pictures are most often grounded in reality, he occasionally directs more fantastic or dreamlike films, such as The Company of Wolves, High Spirits, Interview with the Vampire, and In Dreams.

The critical success of Jordan’s early pictures leads him to Hollywood, where he directs High Spirits and We’re No Angels. Both are critical and financial disasters. He later returns home to make the more personal The Crying Game, which is nominated for six Academy Awards. Jordan wins the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film. Its unexpected success leads him back to American studio filmmaking, where he directs Interview with the Vampire. He also directs the crime drama The Brave One starring Jodie Foster.

Jordan also writes and directs the Irish-made film Ondine (2009), starring Colin Farrell and Alicja Bachleda-Curuś. He also directs Byzantium, an adaptation of the vampire play of the same name starring Saoirse Ronan, Gemma Arterton, and Jonny Lee Miller.

Jordan lives in Dalkey, which is a part of the larger town of Dún Laoghaire.


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Death of Teresa Deevy, Playwright & Writer

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Teresa Deevy, deaf Irish playwright, short story writer, and writer for radio, dies in Waterford, County Waterford on January 19, 1963.

Deevy is born on January 21, 1894, in Waterford. She is the youngest of 13 siblings, all girls. Her mother is Mary Feehan Deevy and her father is Edward Deevy who passes away when she is two years old.

Deevy attends the Ursuline Convent in Waterford and in 1913, at the age of 19, she enrolls in University College Dublin, to become a teacher. However, that same year, she becomes deaf through Ménière’s disease and has to relocate to University College Cork so she can receive treatment in the Cork Ear, Eye, and Throat Hospital, while also being closer to the family home. In 1914 she goes to London to learn lip reading and returns to Ireland in 1919. She starts writing plays and contributing articles and stories to the press around 1919.

Deevy’s return to Ireland takes place during the Irish War of Independence and this heavily influences her writing and ideology as she is heavily involved in the nationalistic cause. She heavily admires Constance Markievicz and joins Cumann na mBan, an Irish women’s Republican group and auxiliary to the Irish Volunteers.

In 1930 Deevy has her first production at the Abbey Theatre, Reapers. Many more follow in rapid succession, such as In Search of Valour, Temporal Powers, The King of Spain’s Daughter and Katie Roche, the play she is perhaps best known for. Her works are generally very well received with some of them winning competitions, becoming headline performances, or being revived numerous times. After a number of plays staged in the Abbey, her relationship with the theater sours over the rejection of her play, Wife to James Whelan in 1937.

After Deevy stops writing plays for the Abbey, she mainly concentrates on radio, a remarkable feat considering she had already become deaf before radio had become a popular medium in Ireland in the mid-to-late 1920s. She has a prolific output for twenty years on Raidio Éireann and on the BBC.

Deevy is elected to the prestigious Irish Academy of Letters in 1954, as a recognition to her contribution to the Irish theater. Her sister, Nell, with whom she had lived in Dublin, dies in the same year, so she returns to Waterford. She becomes a familiar figure in Waterford as she cycles around the city on her “High Nelly” bike.

When Deevy’s health begins to fail she is eventually admitted to the Maypark Nursing Home in Waterford. She dies there on January 19, 1963, at the age of 68, two days before her birthday.


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Death of Alan Rickman, Actor & Director

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Alan Sidney Patrick Rickman, English actor and director, dies in London on January 14, 2016.

Rickman is born into a working-class family of Irish and Welsh descent in Hammersmith, London, on February 21, 1946. Rickman attends Derwentwater Primary School in Acton, and then Latymer Upper School in London through the Direct Grant system, where he becomes involved in drama. After leaving Latymer, he attends Chelsea College of Art and Design and then the Royal College of Art. After graduation, Rickman and several friends open a graphic design studio called Graphiti, but after three years of successful business, he decides that he is going to pursue acting professionally. He writes to request an audition with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), which he attends from 1972 until 1974.

Upon leaving the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Rickman becomes a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, performing in modern and classical theatre productions. His first big television role comes in 1982, but his big break is as the Vicomte de Valmont in the stage production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 1985, for which he is nominated for a Tony Award.

Rickman’s first film role is as the German terrorist leader Hans Gruber in Die Hard (1988). His other film roles include the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), for which he receives the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role, Elliott Marston in Quigley Down Under (1990), Jamie in Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990), P.L. O’Hara in An Awfully Big Adventure (1995), Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility (1995), Éamon de Valera in Neil Jordan‘s Michael Collins (1996), Alexander Dane in Galaxy Quest (1999), Harry in Love Actually (2003) and Judge Turpin in the film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim‘s musical of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007). He gains further notice for his film performances as Severus Snape in the Harry Potter series. He also stars in television films, playing the title character in Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny (1996), which wins him a Golden Globe Award, an Emmy Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award, and Dr. Alfred Blalock in the Emmy-winning Something the Lord Made (2004). His final film roles are as Lieutenant General Frank Benson in the thriller Eye in the Sky (2015), and the voice of Absolem, the caterpillar in Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016).

In August 2015, Rickman suffers a minor stroke, which leads to the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. He reveals the fact that he has terminal cancer to only his closest confidants. He dies of pancreatic cancer on January 14, 2016, at the age of 69. His remains are cremated on February 3, 2016, in the West London Crematorium in Kensal Green. His ashes are given to his wife, Rima Horton. His final two films, Eye in the Sky and Alice Through the Looking Glass, are dedicated to his memory.


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Birth of Herbert Brenon, Director, Actor & Screenwriter

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Herbert Brenon, Irish film director, actor and screenwriter during the era of silent movies through the 1930s, is born Alexander Herbert Reginald St. John Brenon on January 13, 1880.

Brenon is born at 25 Crosthwaite Park, in Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin) to journalist, poet, and politician Edward St. John Brenon and Francis Harries.

In 1882, the family moves to London, where Brenon is educated at St. Paul’s School and at King’s College London. He starts out as a stagehand in New York City and by 1909 he operates a small picture theatre in Pennsylvania. Before becoming a director, he performs in vaudeville acts with his wife, Helen Oberg.

In 1911 Brenon is hired as a writer by Carl Laemmle, directing his first short the following year. Signed by William Fox in 1915, he graduates to feature films. With Paramount Pictures from 1923, he directs several spectacular productions with British themes, including the silent version of Beau Geste (1926). He regards sound pictures with a measure of apprehension.

Some of his more noteworthy films are the first movie adaptations of Peter Pan (1924) and the aforementioned Beau Geste (1926), Sorrell and Son (1927) for which he is nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director in the 1st Academy Awards, Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928) with Lon Chaney, and The Flying Squad (1940), his last.

Brenon returns to Great Britain in 1934, but his career is well on the decline, and he retires in 1940.

Herbert Brenon dies in Los Angeles, California on June 21, 1958, and is interred in a private mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, New York.


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Birth of John Lynch, Actor & Novelist

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John Lynch, actor and novelist, is born in Corrinshego, County Armagh, Northern Ireland on December 26, 1961. He wins the AFI (AACTA) Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for the 1995 film Angel Baby. His other film appearances include Cal (1984), The Secret Garden (1993), In the Name of the Father (1993) and Sliding Doors (1998).

Lynch is the eldest of five children of an Irish father and an Italian mother from Trivento in the Province of Campobasso. His younger sister Susan and his nephew Thomas Finnegan are also actors. He attends St. Colman’s College, Newry and begins acting in Irish language-medium plays at school during the early years of the conflict in Northern Ireland.

Lynch has appeared in numerous films related to Northern Ireland’s problems such as Cal (1984) with Helen Mirren, In the Name of the Father (1993) with Daniel Day-Lewis, The Railway Station Man (1992) with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, Nothing Personal (1995) and Some Mother’s Son (1996), also with Mirren, as well as the Irish-themed film Evelyn (2002).

Lynch stars as a supporting actor in Derek Jarman‘s Edward II (1991), as Lord Craven in Agnieska Holland‘s film of The Secret Garden (1993), as Tadhg in The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), and as Gerry in Sliding Doors (1998).

Lynch plays the part of football legend George Best in the 2000 film Best. He plays the lead in the Australian feature Angel Baby, winning the Australian Film Institute award for best leading actor and the Australian Film Critics Association award for best actor of 1995. He is nominated for a Satellite Film Award for the film Moll Flanders in 1996. He works with acclaimed Belgian director Marion Hänsel on her adaptation of Booker-nominated author Damon Galgut‘s novel, The Quarry (1998), which wins Best Film at the Montreal World Film Festival. He wins Best Actor for the lead role in Best at the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival in 2000.

Lynch is nominated for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) for Cal, as well as for an Irish Film and Television Award for his role in The Baby War. He stars in Five Day Shelter as Stephen, which wins a European Film Award and is in competition at the Rome Film Festival. He plays the lead in Craig Vivieros’ first feature film, the prison drama Ghosted. He plays the role of Wollfstan in Black Death and appears in the 2012 film version of Michael Morpurgo‘s novel, Private Peaceful.

Lynch is also a novelist. His first novel, Torn Water, is published in November 2005 by the 4th Estate, a literary imprint of HarperCollins Publishers LLC, and his second, Falling Out of Heaven, is published on May 13, 2010, by the same publisher.


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Birth of Daniel O’Donnell, Singer & Presenter

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Daniel Francis Noel O’Donnell, singer, television presenter and philanthropist affectionately known as “Wee Daniel,” is born in Kincasslagh, County Donegal on December 12, 1961. After rising to public attention in 1983 he has since become a household name in Ireland and Britain. He has also had considerable success in the United States and Australia. In 2012, he becomes the first artist to have a different album in the British charts every year for 25 consecutive years.

Known for his close relationship with his fanbase, and his charismatic and engaging stage presence, O’Donnell’s music has been described as a mix of country and Irish folk. He has had twenty UK Top 40 albums as well as fifteen Top 40 singles and has sold 10 million records to date. He is widely considered a “cultural icon” in Ireland, and is often parodied in the media.

During his school years, O’Donnell considers pursuing a career in banking. Despite this, a career in music is also always a possibility. As a youngster, O’Donnell performs in the local religious choir. In 1980, he goes to Galway to pursue business studies, however, he never settles down and by Christmas he is in his sister Margo‘s band.

Not getting enough opportunities to perform solos with the band, in 1983 O’Donnell decides to record his own record. On February 9, 1983, he records his first single, Johnny McCauley‘s My Donegal Shore, with £1,200 of his own money, selling all the copies himself. Later that year, he forms his own musical group, Country Fever. After the group disbands, he forms The Grassroots. In 1985, the manager of the Ritz label, Mick Clerkin, sees him perform and introduces him to Sean Reilly, who remains as his manager to this day.

Under Reilly’s management, O’Donnell starts to sell concerts out in England on a regular basis. By January 1992, he has hit rock bottom with exhaustion. After a three-month recovery break, he returns to the stage, this time at the Point Theatre, Dublin.

By the mid-1990s, O’Donnell has become a household name across Ireland and Great Britain. He appears on popular television shows in both countries and wins various awards. Among the accolades, he is named Donegal Person of the Year in 1989, which he still rates as the best award. He is given the Irish Entertainer of the Year award in 1989, 1992 and 1996. His first chart hit single in the UK is in 1992 with I Just Want to Dance With You (later covered by George Strait). This also leads to his first-ever appearance on Top of the Pops.

During his lengthy career, O’Donnell has made friends with his childhood idols, including Cliff Richard and Loretta Lynn. He has also forged a close professional relationship with the Irish songstress Mary Duff, who regularly tours with O’Donnell.

On November 4, 2002, O’Donnell marries Majella McLennan from Thurles, whom he had met on holiday in Tenerife three years previously. The couple lives in Meenbanad, County Donegal, and spend time at their second home in Tenerife.


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Birth of Kenneth Branagh, Actor, Director & Producer

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Sir Kenneth Charles Branagh, British actor, director, producer, and screenwriter, is born in Belfast on December 10, 1960.

Branagh is the middle of three children of working-class Protestant parents Frances (née Harper) and William Branagh, a plumber and joiner who runs a company that specialises in fitting partitions and suspended ceilings. He lives in the Tiger’s Bay area of the city and is educated at Grove Primary School.

At the age of nine, Branagh moves with his family to Reading, Berkshire, England, to escape the Troubles. He is educated at Whiteknights Primary School, then Meadway School, Tilehurst, where he appears in school productions such as Toad of Toad Hall and Oh, What a Lovely War!. He attends the amateur Reading Cine & Video Society (now called Reading Film & Video Makers) as a member and is a keen member of Progress Theatre for whom he is now the patron. He goes on to train at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and in 2015 succeeds Richard Attenborough as its president.

Branagh has both directed and starred in several film adaptations of William Shakespeare‘s plays, including Henry V (1989) (for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor and Academy Award for Best Director), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Othello (1995), Hamlet (1996) (for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay), Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000), and As You Like It (2006).

Branagh stars in numerous other films and television series including Fortunes of War (1987), Woody Allen‘s Celebrity (1998), Wild Wild West (1999), The Road to El Dorado (2000), Conspiracy (2001), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), Warm Springs (2005), as Major General Henning von Tresckow in Valkyrie (2008), The Boat That Rocked (2009), Wallander (2008–2016), My Week with Marilyn (2011) as Sir Laurence Olivier (nominated for Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor), and as Royal Navy Commander Bolton in the action-thriller Dunkirk (2017). He directs such films as Dead Again (1991), in which he also stars, Swan Song (1992) (nominated for Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) in which he also stars, The Magic Flute (2006), Sleuth (2007), the blockbuster superhero film Thor (2011), the action thriller Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014) in which he also co-stars, the live-action film Cinderella (2015), and the mystery drama adaptation of Agatha Christie‘s Murder on the Orient Express (2017), in which he also stars as Hercule Poirot.

Branagh narrates the series Cold War (1998), the BBC documentary miniseries Walking with Dinosaurs (1999), Walking with Beasts (2001) and Walking with Monsters (2005). He has been nominated for five Academy Awards, five Golden Globe Awards, and has won three BAFTAs, and an Emmy Award. He is appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 2012 Birthday Honours and is knighted on November 9, 2012. He is awarded the Freedom of the City of his native city of Belfast in January 2018.


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Assassination of Ross McWhirter

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Alan Ross McWhirter, co-founder of The Guinness Book of Records and a contributor to Record Breakers, is murdered by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) on November 27, 1975.

McWhirter is the youngest son of William McWhirter, editor of the Sunday Pictorial, and Margaret “Bunty” Williamson. He is born at Winchmore Hill, Middlesex, England on August 12, 1925. Like his two brothers, he is educated at Marlborough College and Trinity College, Oxford. Between 1943 and 1946 he serves as a sub-lieutenant with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve on board a minesweeper in the Mediterranean Sea.

Ross and his twin brother Norris become sports journalists in 1950. In 1951, they found an agency to provide facts and figures to Fleet Street, setting out, in Norris McWhirter’s words “to supply facts and figures to newspapers, yearbooks, encyclopaedias and advertisers.” In the same year they publish Get to Your Marks.

While building up their accounts, they both work as sports journalists. One of the athletes they know and cover is runner Christopher Chataway, an employee at Guinness who recommends them to Hugh Beaver. After an interview in 1954 in which the Guinness directors enjoy testing the twins’ knowledge of records and unusual facts, the brothers agree to start work on the book that becomes The Guinness Book of Records. In August 1955, the first 198-page green volume is at the bookstalls, and in four more months it is the UK’s number one non-fiction best-seller. Both brothers are regulars on the BBC show Record Breakers. They are noted for their encyclopedic memories, enabling them to provide detailed answers to questions from the audience about entries in The Guinness Book of Records. Norris continues on the programme after Ross’s death.

In the early 1960s, McWhirter is a Conservative Party activist and seeks, unsuccessfully, the seat of Edmonton in the 1964 general election. Following his killing, his brother and others found the National Association for Freedom (later The Freedom Association).

McWhirter advocates various restrictions on the freedom of the Irish community in Britain, such as making it compulsory for all of them to register with the local police and to provide signed photographs of themselves when renting flats or booking into hotels and hostels. In addition, he offers a £50,000 reward for information leading to a conviction for several recent high-profile bombings in England that were publicly claimed by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). In doing so, he recognises that he might then be a target himself. This is considered a “bounty” by the IRA Army Council, a view that leads directly to the events that follow, although the idea is not originally his, but that of John Gouriet.

At 6:45 PM on November 27, 1975, McWhirter is shot and killed by two IRA volunteers, Harry Duggan and Hugh Doherty, both of whom are members of what becomes known as the Balcombe Street Gang, the group for whose capture McWhirter had offered the reward. He is shot with a .357 Magnum revolver at close range in the head and chest outside his home in Village Road, Bush Hill Park. He is taken to Chase Farm Hospital but dies soon after being admitted. His killers are captured and charged with his and nine other murders. They are sentenced to life imprisonment but freed in 1999 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.


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Birth of Hugh Leonard, Dramatist, Writer & Essayist

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Hugh Leonard, Irish dramatist, television writer and essayist, is born in Dublin on November 9, 1926. In a career that spans 50 years, he writes nearly 30 full-length plays, 10 one-act plays, three volumes of essays, two autobiographies, three novels and numerous screenplays and teleplays, as well as writing a regular newspaper column.

After birth, Leonard is put up for adoption. Raised in Dalkey, a suburb of Dublin, by Nicholas and Margaret Keyes, he changes his name to John Keyes Byrne. For the rest of his life, despite the pen name of “Hugh Leonard” which he later adopts and becomes well known by, he invites close friends to call him “Jack.”

Leonard is educated at the Harold Boys’ National School, Dalkey, and Presentation College, Glasthule, winning a scholarship to the latter. He works as a civil servant for fourteen years. During that time, he both acts in and writes plays for community theatre groups. His first play to be professionally produced is The Big Birthday, which is mounted by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1956. His career with the Abbey Theatre continues until 1994. After that his plays are produced regularly by Dublin’s theatres.

Leonard moves to Manchester for a while, working for Granada Television before returning to Ireland in 1970. There he settles in Dalkey.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Leonard is the first major Irish writer to establish a reputation in television, writing extensively for television including original plays, comedies, thrillers and adaptations of classic novels for British television. He is commissioned by RTÉ to write Insurrection, a 50th anniversary dramatic reconstruction of the Easter Rising of 1916. His Silent Song, adapted for the BBC from a short story by Frank O’Connor, wins the Prix Italia in 1967. He writes the script for the RTÉ adaptation of Strumpet City by James Plunkett.

Three of Leonard’s plays have been presented on Broadway: The Au Pair Man (1973), which stars Charles Durning and Julie Harris, Da (1978) and A Life (1980). Of these, Da, which originates off-off-Broadway at the Hudson Guild theatre before transferring to the Morosco Theatre, is the most successful, running for 20 months and 697 performances, then touring the United States for ten months. It earns Leonard both a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for Best Play. It is made into a film in 1988, starring Martin Sheen and Barnard Hughes, who reprises his Tony Award-winning Broadway performance.

Leonard writes two volumes of autobiography, Home Before Night (1979) and Out After Dark (1989). Some of his essays and journalism are collected in Leonard’s Last Book (1978) and A Peculiar People and Other Foibles (1979). In 1992 the Selected Plays of Hugh Leonard is published. Until 2006 he writes a humorous weekly column, “The Curmudgeon,” for the Irish Sunday Independent newspaper. He has a passion for cats and restaurants, and an abhorrence of broadcaster Gay Byrne.

Even after retiring as a Sunday Independent columnist, Leonard displays an acerbic humour. In an interview with Brendan O’Connor, he is asked if it galls him that Gay Byrne is now writing his old column. His reply is, “It would gall me more if he was any good at it.” He is a patron of the Dublin Theatre Festival.

In 1994, Leonard appears in a televised interview with Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Féin, an Irish political party associated with the Provisional Irish Republican Army. He has long been an opponent of political violence and a critic of the IRA. However, on the show and afterwards he is criticised for being “sanctimonious and theatrical” towards Adams. At one point he refers to Sinn Féin as “dogs.”

Hugh Leonard – Odd Man In, a film on his life and work is shown on RTÉ in March 2009. Leonard’s final play, Magicality, is not performed during his lifetime. A rehearsed reading of the second act is staged at the Dalkey Castle and Heritage Centre in June 2012.

Hugh Leonard dies after a long illness on February 12, 2009, in his hometown of Dalkey at the age of 82, leaving €1.5 million in his will.