It brought Leonard both a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for Best Play. Leonard's three Broadway plays were The Au Pair Man (1973), which starred Charles Durning and Julie Harris Da (1978) and A Life (1980).ĭa originated Off-Off-Broadway at the Hudson Guild Theatre before transferring to the Morosco Theater, running for 20 months and 697 performances and touring the United States for ten months. His first wife of 45 years, Paule Jacquet, also died in 2000.Expected to speak are Doug Hughes, whose father Barnard starred in Leonard's Da on Broadway, plus that play's director Melvin Bernhardt and star Brian Murray, and more. Leonard is survived by his second wife, Kathy Bateson, whom he wed in 2000, and a daughter from his first marriage. He also wrote a two-volume best-selling autobiography, Home Before Night (1979) and Out After Dark (1989). In his later years, Leonard cast a weekly caustic eye on modern Ireland in his Sunday Independent newspaper column, in which he branded himself “Curmudgeon.” From that rambling, at-times stream-of-conscious pulpit he alternately mocked, cajoled and praised the leading lights of the day in Dublin and far beyond. A film version of “Da” starring Martin Sheen appeared in 1988. Together they reflect on the key moments of compassion and disconnection in their parting lives.
The play, drawing on his own upbringing by adoptive parents, explores a writer returning home to Ireland upon his adoptive father’s death - and finding himself caught in bittersweet dialogue with his ghost, who refuses to leave him. Leonard’s talents reached an international stage when his play “Da” made a triumphant two-year run on Broadway in 1977-78.
He wrote 16 plays specifically for the Dublin Theatre Festival, starting with “A Walk on the Water” in 1960, and served as the festival’s program director from 1978 to 1980. In the 1960s, Leonard became Ireland’s most accomplished adapter of classic works and short stories to the Irish stage and screen, and a driving force in the promotion of modern Irish stagecraft.
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