The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a play written by English playwright and director Martin McDonagh in 1996. McDonagh was born to an Irish family in London in 1970. Ireland would go on to play a central role in much of McDonagh's work, with several pieces, including The Beauty Queen, being set in the country. The Beauty Queen of Leenane was McDonagh's first staged work. He wrote majority of the script in 1995 and it premiered in Galway, Ireland in February, 1996. It toured around Ireland and England before premiering in New York in 1998. The play was restaged again in 2010 and 2016.
The Beauty Queen of Leenane play centers around the life of an unmarried woman in her early 40s as she cares for her ailing mother and tries to find love. The production was a major success, winning four Tony Awards in 1998 amongst other awards. McDonagh followed up with another play set in Ireland, A Skull in Connemara, released in 1997. In 2004 he wrote and directed his first film, Six Shooter, for which he was awarded an Oscar. Four years later he wrote and directed the critically acclaimed In Bruges, followed by Seven Psychopaths in 2012. His most recent film, Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri received outstanding reviews and was awarded two Academy Awards.
