Martin McDonagh Biography

Martin McDonagh is a playwright and filmmaker, known for violent and comic stories in plays such as The Beauty Queen of Leenane, and films such as Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and The Banshees of Inisherin.

Born in London to Irish parents, McDonagh left school as a teenager. Living alone and in his early 20s, he began writing stories and then plays. By the time he was 27, four of his plays were running simultaneously in London.

He was an enfant terrible of the theater world, and his snappy, profane dialogue and gruesome comic touches made his plays successful in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They include The Lieutenant of Inishmore, The Pillowman, The Beauty Queen of Leenane and The Lonesome West.

His first feature film, In Bruges, starred Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson and earned good reviews if not box office cash.

McDonagh’s second film was Seven Psychopaths (2012), a dark comedy that was perhaps unfairly dismissed as a Quentin Tarantino rip-off.

His third film was Three Billboard Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), and starred Frances McDormand and Woody Harrelson. It brought McDonagh an Oscar nomination for writing and was also nominated as the best picture of the year.

McDonagh’s next film was The Banshees of Inisherin (2022, starring Farrell and Gleeson again, with a supporting role by Oscar-nominated Kerry Condon). He was nominated for Oscars for writing and for directing, and the movie was nominated for best picture.