Irish filmmaker Jim Sheridan emulated his stage-director father by working in Dublin-based children's theater, then with the "alternate theater" Project Art Centre, an organization Sheridan co-founded. He left the Centre over a dispute concerning a gay-themed production, then moved to New York, where he briefly enrolled in the N.Y.U. film school and served as artistic director of the Irish Arts Center. With his movie directorial debut, the Oscar-nominated My Left Foot (1989), Sheridan inaugurated a harmonious working relationship with Irish actor Daniel Day-Lewis, which has yielded such excellent projects as In the Name of the Father (1993). One of Sheridan's most ambitious film projects has been Into the West (1992), a child's-eye-view affair that juggles reality and fantasy with dizzying expertise. Hal Erickson

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