Hugh Leonard

Hugh Leonard (9 November 1926 – 12 February 2009) was an Irish playwright and author. In a career that spanned 50 years, he wrote nearly 30 full-length plays, 10 one-act plays, three volumes of essay, two autobiographies, three novels, numerous screenplays and teleplays, and a regular newspaper column.

Leonard was born in Dublin as John Joseph Byrne, but was put up for adoption. Raised in Dalkey, an affluent suburb of Dublin, by Nicholas and Margaret Keyes, he changed his name to John Keyes Byrne. For the rest of his life, despite the pen name of "Hugh Leonard", which he later adopted and by which became well known, he invited close friends to call him "Jack".

Leonard was educated at the Harold Boys' National School, Dalkey, and Presentation College, Glasthule, winning a scholarship to the latter. He worked as a civil servant for 14 years. During that time, he both acted in and wrote plays for community theatre groups. His first play to be professionally produced was The Big Birthday, which was mounted by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1956. His career with the Abbey Theatre continued until 1994. After that, his plays were produced regularly by Dublin's theatres.

He moved to Manchester for a while, working for Granada Television, before returning to Ireland in 1970, settling in Dalkey.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Leonard was 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 was commissioned by RTÉ to write Insurrection, a 50th-anniversary dramatic reconstruction of the Irish uprising of Easter 1916. Leonard's Silent Song, adapted for the BBC from a short story by Frank O'Connor, won the Prix Italia in 1967. He wrote 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 starred Charles Durning and Julie Harris; Da (1978); and A Life (1980). Of these, Da – which premiered at the Olney Theatre in 1973 before being produced off-off-Broadway at the Hudson Guild Theatre and then transferring to the Morosco Theatre – was the most successful, running for 20 months and 697 performances, then touring the United States for 10 months. It earned Leonard both a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for Best Play. It was made into a film in 1988, starring Martin Sheen and Barnard Hughes, who reprised his Tony Award-winning Broadway performance.

In 1984, Leonard discovered his accountant Russell Murphy had embezzled IR£258,000 from him. Leonard was particularly upset that Murphy had used his money to take clients to the theatre and purchased expensive seats at some of Leonard's plays.

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