FRANK DEASY:THE DUBLIN-BORN television scriptwriter Frank Deasy, who has died during an operation to give him a liver transplant at the age of 49, had reached the pinnacle of his profession, having won an Emmy for Prime Suspect: The Final Actin 2006, and received much acclaim for his four-part television series The Passion last year.
His crime series Father and Son, set in Manchester and Dublin and starring Dougray Scott, was shown on RTÉ earlier this year, and has still to be shown in Britain by co-producer ITV. Deasy was working on the screenplay of Gaza, a BBC feature starring Helen Mirren as a secular Jewish doctor in the Middle East.
Deasy, who was raised in Artane, studied at Trinity College Dublin before becoming a social worker with the Eastern Health Board. He worked with communities threatened by heroin addiction in Dublin. He was active in left-wing politics, and was a prominent member of the late Jim Kemmy’s Democratic Socialist Party.
Together with Joe Lee, he founded the film company City Vision and produced the shorts One Day Timeand Sometime Citybefore writing and co-directing with Lee his first full-length film, The Courier(1988), in Irish and English. It starred Gabriel Byrne as a reformed drug user attempting to crack a drug-dealing operation.
Deasy delicately adapted his screenplay for Gillies MacKinnon's The Grass Arena(1991) from the powerful and moving autobiography of John Healy (Mark Rylance), a boxer who became an alcoholic but who finds salvation in chess. Captives(1994), directed by Angela Pope, was a taut erotic thriller in which dentist Julia Ormond, who works part time in Wandsworth prison, has a torrid affair with prisoner Tim Roth.
Deasy, having now moved to Glasgow, wrote the thriller Looking After Jo-Jo(1998) for BBC Scotland, which starred Robert Carlyle as a petty thief turned drug dealer. It was clear from these screenplays that Deasy's forte was writing gritty, intelligent atmospheric dramas with street cred. Also for the BBC were Real Men(2003), about abuse in a children's home, and England Expects(2004), about racism in the workplace.
On the strength of these, Deasy was offered the chance to follow Lynda La Plante and various other writers on Prime Suspect. The two-part, four-hour finale proved to be vintage television, with Mirren giving a magisterial valedictory performance as Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison. "Don't call me 'ma'am'," she says to a colleague near the end. "I'm not the bloody Queen."
The Passion, the gospel according to Deasy, which the BBC screened at Easter 2008, seemed in contrast to his other work, except for the strong human values. "What I personally was fascinated by was the duality of Jesus in his divinity and his humanity," Deasy told Christian Today. "This is essentially a mystery, but his humanity has to be total, otherwise he is somewhat of a tourist in his own Passion. I've tried to find a human truth that feels real and that is not always the same as a theological truth, and so I would hope that people would be open to the fact they are watching a piece of drama rather than a theological treatise."
Deasy had already been diagnosed with liver cancer four years previously when he underwent surgery to remove the tumour. Sadly, it was found to have returned in January this year. In the Observeron September 13th, he wrote about his wait for a transplant. "I am only one of thousands of patients on organ transplant lists in Britain, living on our own, invisible, death row . . . I take the kids to school, we celebrate birthdays and argue over whether they're old enough to walk to school on their own. They probably are, but the one thing I know for certain is they're not old enough to be without their Dad."
The article prompted an hour-long interview with Deasy on the RTÉ radio programme Liveline. As a consequence, thousands of people signed up to carry organ donor cards.
Deasy married Marie Connolly, a criminal lawyer, in 1996. She and their three children survive him.
Frank Deasy, born 1960; died September 17th, 2009