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. He quit his day job in 1957 after the Abbey Theatre triumph of his first play, The Birthday Party, the year before. He was born John Keyes Byrne, but took on the pen name Hugh Leonard in the arch-conservative Catholic Ireland of the 1950s to hide from his Irish civil service employers his double-life as an aspiring, outspoken writer. Irish President Mary McAleese lauded Leonard as a writer who ``infused his work with a unique wit, all the while demonstrating a great intuition, perceptiveness and forgiveness of human nature." He was 82 and had been hospitalized for more than a year battling various illnesses. DUBLIN–Irish playwright and commentator Hugh Leonard, who won a Tony Award in 1978 for his bittersweet father-and-son drama Da, died Thursday.
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