Da is a 1988 film directed by Matt Clark, produced by Julie Corman, and starring Martin Sheen, Barnard Hughes, reprising his Tony Award-winning Broadway performance, and William Hickey. The screenplay was written by Irish playwright and journalist Hugh Leonard, who adapted it from his 1978 play Da, with additional material from his autobiographical book Home Before Night.
Charlie is a playwright in New York who must travel to Ireland to oversee the burial of his father, "Da". During his time there he visits his childhood home, and is visited by the spirit of his deceased father. Charlie then travels down memory lane, reliving both happy and sad memories.
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Irish author Hugh Leonard's play Home Before Night was the basis of Da. Martin Sheen plays an Irish/ American playwright living in New York. No matter how much he's assimilated himself, Sheen cannot escape the influence of his deceased adoptive father (Barnard Hughes). The writer has several heated confrontations with the "ghosts" of his father and mother (Doreen Hepburn), as well as with his own adolescent self (Karl Hayden). Sheen comes to realize that his own success was in part sparked by the failures of hiS “Da", a gardener who spent his life speaking in empty aphorisms and wishing he were someone else.