He was born in Killyclogher, County Tyrone in 1929.
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Deane visited his friend at his Donegal home recently said that although Friel had been “fading fast” due to illness, he preferred to remain at home rather than undergo lengthy treatment in hospital.
Brian Friel pictured with actor Stephen Rea in The Patrician Hall, Carrickmore.
“He describes the events that lead to the fracturing of the Mundy family in the summer of 1936 in the town of Ballybeg in County Donegal, Ireland”, she said in a release.
Brian Friel has been laid to rest in Glenties Cemetery.
Irish taoiseach Enda Kenny said Friel’s death was a loss to Ireland and the world.
The nobel prize-winner Seamus Heaney and filmmaker Neil Jordan were collaborators of Friel’s.
Plays such as Aristocrats (1979), Translations (1980), and the Tony award-winning Dancing at Lughnasa (1990; film adaptation, 1998)-deal with family ties, communication and mythmaking as human needs, and the tangled relationships between narrative, history, and nationality.
And the often awkward and stilting conversations between his protaganists did as much to explain the Irish psyche to ourselves, as it did to the world.
Northern Ireland’s Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness described Friel as “one of our greatest ever playwrights”.
Friel was never taken to self-publicity and shunned the media, to the extent that even when being celebrated with a bronze plaque with his handprints outside the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, he reluctantly welcomed it saying: “I don’t know what the word is, exciting, it’s very interesting”.
“His power and persistence, his intelligence and humour, his enormously generous hospitality and friendship informed all of our activities”, he told The Irish Times. Like Yeats, he was offered the chance to have an official say in public affairs when Charles Haughey appointed him an independent member of Senate for two years from 1987.
“Brian Friel’s many achievements, nationally and internationally, are too numerous to mention and his legacy is a truly great one”.
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“It is with great sadness that I have heard of the passing of Brian Friel who was and will be remembered as one of the giants of Irish Literature, and a great Irishman”.
