Extraordinarily successful, film star handsome and now on his way to the Oscars, he has also had a tabloid spat with Sean Connery. McDonagh's film, Six Shooter, which he wrote and directed, is nominated for an Academy Award in the short films category. No one who knows him is surprised that he has moved into film.

Gary Hynes, artistic director of the Druid Theatre Company, which first produced the Leenane trilogy, says, "In our initial discussions, Martin's references were almost entirely filmic. His great strengths are narrative drive and characterisation, which is what you need in film. He's always wanted to do it." Asked if he had ever expressed an interest in directing for the stage, Hynes says, "Not that I know of, no. I'm not so sure of his interest in the slog of that."

McDonagh is currently in New York, preparing his satire on republican violence, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, for the Atlantic Theatre, where Druid gave The Beauty Queen of Leenane its first performance in America. So he is not abandoning theatre. However, although it is a strange thing to say about a man who, at the age of only 27, became the first playwright since Shakespeare to have four plays running in London at the one time, Martin McDonagh does not seem to like the theatre very much.

He cites the films of David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick and Quentin Tarantino as the major influences on his writing. He has said that he enjoyed David Mamet's American Buffalo and Sam Shepard's True West. But, he told Sean O'Hagan of the Guardian some years ago, "The whole theatre thing just makes me intensely uncomfortable to the point that I react just like my parents . . . you know, 'Theatre's not for the likes of us.'" Six Shooterwas produced by the BBC's creative head of comedy, Kenton Allen. It was, according to Allen's wife, Imogen Edwards-Jones, "financed on credit cards and filmed on his holidays". Allen's previous projects include The Royle Family. But when the time finally came after three years in gestation, he took his time off from the day job to film Six Shooter in Ireland.

All McDonagh's film influences are visible in Six Shooter.

It is the best . . . and perhaps the sole . . . evocation of the madness of train travel in Ireland.

Its other elements are less successful, despite an excellent performance from Brendan Gleeson in the lead role. It was shown on RTE on 28 December as part of the Screenshort series, and will be shown again on 5 March. Eilish Kent, drama development executive at RTE, explains that the audience for the film is "in the 18 to 35 age group" and describes it as "very edgy, very Irish".

Ireland has provided Martin McDonagh with a mother lode of material. He has never lived here. His Ireland is an imagined place of cartoon-like intensity. Perhaps it is an Ireland which was seen . . . and felt . . .through the eyes of an emigrants' child who migrated to Ireland every summer with his parents. He has been accused of perpetuating stage-Irish stereotypes in his plays, but it must be said that audiences in Ireland flock to see his work.

His combination of melodrama and comedy makes for solid entertainment, even if some critics wonder what he actually has to say. The only blip in his popularity here was The Pillowman, brought to Cork during the City of Culture festival.

The Saturday matinee was cancelled due to a low box office.

He grew up in Camberwell, south London. His Galway father worked in the construction industry, his Sligo mother worked as a housekeeper. Martin dropped out of school at 16 and eventually his parents retired to Connemara.

They left Martin and his brother, John, living together and it was at this time that Martin started to build his own Ireland.

Originally it was John McDonagh who wanted to be a writer and Martin who sneaked looks at his How To Be A Writer books. There followed 10 years on the dole for the brothers. Martin has recalled how writing was "unemployment with honour".

His writing apprenticeship was spent in producing radio plays, most of which nobody wanted.

He collected rejection slips and learned about "story and character, which is all you need for theatre".

McDonagh has written two Connemara trilogies, named after Leenane and Aran. Like the work of that other visitor to Connemara, Synge, the speech of his characters never tried to mimic the way that Irish people actually talk. The Lieutenant of Inishmore, for example, centres around the accidental killing of a cat belonging to Padraic, an INLA terrorist.

(Domestic pets, including the rabbit in Six Shooter, are a bit of a motif in McDonagh's work. ) One character says that he is fighting for "an Ireland free for cats to roam about without fear".

As one young woman attending a poor Dublin production of The Lieutenant of Inishmore, from which McDonagh had distanced himself, said after the play, "It was just like Father Ted."

The play was the first comedy about paramilitary violence in Ireland, and was turned down by several theatres both here and in Britain.

Trevor Nunn at London's National Theatre thought it might endanger the peace process. Its author was unrepentant: "Having grown up Catholic and, to a certain extent, a republican, I thought I should tackle the problems of my own side, " he said, declaring that the play was written "in pacifist rage". In response to criticisms of the violence in all his plays, he has said: "I'll write a romantic comedy when hardly anyone gets murdered at all."

The row with Sean Connery started on the night of the Evening Standard Awards in London. The McDonagh brothers, according to Martin, "were taking the p***" during a proposed toast to the queen. Connery did not take kindly to it, and put his hands on McDonagh to restrain him. "The worst thing about it was that my mother was totally mortified . . .wouldn't speak to me for a week, " McDonagh said later.

That was back in 1996. But McDonagh will appreciate that a good story never dies. It will be interesting to see whether the Oscars ceremony produces anything comparable.

Martin McDonagh

Born: 26 March 1970, London.

Selected plays: The Leenane Trilogy, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, The Pillowman.

In the news because: His first film, Six Shooter, has been nominated for an Oscar.