"I went through life like an idiot for a great deal of the time, saying there's nothing I would change. That was a very arrogant thing to say. There's a lot I would change. There are people I would have steered clear of." -- Hugh Leonard
Hugh Leonard (9 November 1926 – 12 February 2009) was an Irish dramatist, television writer and essayist. In a career that spanned 50 years, Leonard wrote more than 18 plays, two volumes of essays and two autobiographies, one novel and numerous screenplays and teleplays, as well as writing a regular newspaper column.
"A thing well done is worth doing.""Arnold Bennett was a writer I admired. He was actually taking notes at his father's deathbed.""As somebody once said, we're not punished for our sins, we're punished by them.""Gossip is more popular than literature.""I came down to the living room one day and my wife was standing in the living room. It wasn't an illusion. I saw her out of the corner of my eye. The moment I saw her, she vanished.""I don't think anyone is the perfect one to play me.""I feel like the writer observing the grief, but it is difficult to be detached from it.""I think with every writer there are two people there.""I'm a much nicer person since my wife died. I found out what pain is, so on that level I'm much nicer.""I'm a writer, and what I do is write. I wasn't able to do anything else.""I've always believed in survival.""I've always enjoyed a woman's company more than men's. They're usually better looking.""It's a natural thing for people to say, you know, Who's in this book? I find myself get ting a little defensive. People come along and I'm waiting for that first question.""My father I liked, but it was only after his death that I got to know him by writing the play.""My life is every moment of my life. It is not a culmination of the past.""My mother was passionate. She was stubborn, the dominant one in the family. She dominated my father.""The problem with Ireland is that it's a country full of genius, but with absolutely no talent.""We are all the foolishness and all the crimes we did. We're also all the kindnesses we did. I hate to think of life as if we understood time. We don't understand time.""We were married for almost 45 years. We fought all the time, it wasn't a great love or anything, it wasn't a great, all-consuming passion. She was just there. A lot of people were startled because we didn't seem devoted but we were."
Leonard was born in Dublin as John Joseph Byrne, but was put up for adoption. Raised in Dalkey, a 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 became well-known by, 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 Suit, which was mounted by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1956. 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. There he settled in Dalkey.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Leonard adapted a number of classic novels for British television. In 1969, he won a Jacob's Award for his TV scripts for Nicholas Nickleby and Wuthering Heights. He wrote the script for the RTE 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 originated off-off-Broadway at the Hudson Guild Theatre before transferring to the Morosco Theatre, was the most successful, running for 20 months and 697 performances, then touring the United States for ten 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 Leonards' 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.
Even after retiring as a Sunday Independent columnist, Leonard displayed an acerbic humour. In an interview with Brendan O'Connor, he was asked if it galled him that Gay Byrne was now writing his old column. His reply was, "It would gall me more if he was any good at it." Leonard was a patron of the Dublin Theatre Festival.
In 1994, Leonard appeared in a televised interview with Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, an Irish political party associated with the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Leonard had long been an opponent of political violence and a critic of the IRA. However on the show and afterwards he was criticized for being "sanctimonious and theatrical" towards Adams; at one point he referred to Sinn Fein as "dogs".
Hugh Leonard- Odd Man In, a film on his life and work was shown on RTÉ in March 2009
Leonard died in his hometown, Dalkey, aged 82, after a long illness,, leaving ?1.5 million in his will.
