Randal Plunkett, 21st Baron of Dunsany

Randal Plunkett, 21st Baron of Dunsany (born 9 March 1983), is an Irish film director, producer and editor, as well as a landowner and holder of one of the oldest surviving Irish peerage titles, and one of the longest-inhabited houses in Ireland, Dunsany Castle, and its remaining estate.

Plunkett was born on 8 March 1983 in New York City, where his parents were living at the time operating an architectural and design studio.

He is the elder of the two children (both sons) of the 20th Baron of Dunsany, the painter, sculptor and designer Eddie Plunkett, and his Brazilian wife, architect Maria Alice de Marsillac Plunkett (née Villela de Carvalho).

Aside from his younger brother, he has a step-sister Joana and a step-brother Daniel, both older, and the four children grew up together.

The Plunkett family subsequently moved, first to London, where Eddie Plunkett had a studio in 1993, and then, in 1994, to the Plunkett homeland in Ireland, going to live at Dunsany Castle, where the then Lord Dunsany was living with his second wife.

For primary school, Randal Plunkett attended a local school and the private Headfort School outside Kells, then took his Junior Certificate at The King's Hospital on the outskirts of Dublin.

He pursued senior secondary studies at Institut Le Rosey, a boarding school in Rolle and Gstaad, Switzerland, and at a pre-college centre in Oxford, where he studied the classics, English literature and sociology.

He credited some of his inspiration around film to one of his teachers there, Louise Longson, and has said that, in discussion with her, he moved his focus from sociology to film and scriptwriting, interests since childhood, when his father introduced him to the work of, for example, Luis Buñuel at the age of 6 and Ingmar Bergman at 7, and paid pocket money for short stories and illustrations.

Plunkett lived for some years in central London and studied for a degree in Film Studies at Kingston University in southern London.

He returned to Ireland after graduation, to help care for his father, who was suffering from a long-term neurological illness, and during this period he worked on a potential career in sports science, considering opening a gym, or working as a personal trainer.

Encouraged by his parents, he later returned to the idea of working in film, and pursued an intensive course in Digital Video with an emphasis on practical skills, at the SAE Institute, from the Amsterdam campus of which he graduated with a diploma.

He later studied further at the SAE branch in London, where he met a future collaborator, cinematographer Stefano Battarola.

Plunkett began his filmmaking career around 2009, producing and directing a range of short films, which have been shown at various film festivals.

He then returned to Ireland, producing Guerrilla, directed by Blaine Rennicks and starring Jack Lowe and Darren Killeen, on the Dunsany lands from winter 2009.

His directorial debut was the dark-toned thriller Kiss Kiss (2010), set in London, and shown at the Leicester Square Odeon.

Plunkett succeeded to the Dunsany title upon the death of his father in 2011.

As of 2022, he is engaged to marry, and his properties and title have living heirs.

In his professional life, he has directed a range of film shorts, worked on several dozen other film projects, and provided location and post-production services from his demesne.

Plunkett succeeded to the title of Baron of Dunsany on 24 May 2011, upon the death of his father.

He continues to live at his family's ancient castle, Dunsany Castle, on its estate of over 1500 acres, near Dunshaughlin and Kilmessan, about 30 km north of Dublin.

While the estate was reduced in size under the Irish Land Acts, with much farmland transferred to tenants, it remains a substantial landholding, between Dunshaughlin and the Hill of Tara.

The current heir to his title is his younger brother, Oliver, a games designer and programmer who lives in the US.

This was followed by the "grindhouse horror"-style Prey (2011).

Plunkett's 4th short film, written with some autobiographical elements, was Walt (2011), which won the Best Drama Award at the LIT Festival.

Plunkett has used his estate lands and buildings, some partly ruinous, as locations for much of his filming after Guerrilla, including for Prey and Walt.

Plunkett's cited influences include Philip K. Dick and directors Roman Polanski, David Lynch and Peter Greenaway, and influential films include Hitchcock's The Crows and both Andrei Tarkovsky's and Steven Soderbergh's productions of Solaris.

The low-budget film, with a crew of 40, was based on a concept of Ireland under martial law after social collapse in Europe in 2013, and was released in 2010.

It won the "Best Production" award at the Naas Film Festival.

Plunkett became an advocate for rewilding in 2014 and has dedicated over a third of the ancestral estate in County Meath as Ireland's largest private nature reserve.

First successes of the project include the return of the corncrake, several species of birds of prey, including the Red-listed red kite, the rare Great Spotted Woodpecker and other birds, as well as multiple other animal species, including pine marten, stoat and the Red-listed otter.

A number of rescued wildlife are also being re-released after rehabilitation by local wildlife rescues.

He has made appearances in Irish and international media, promoting the rewilding cause.

He produced his first feature film, The Green Sea in 2018–2019 and released it in 2021.

On the paternal side, he is the great-grandson of the 18th Baron of Dunsany, the playwright and author of fantasy stories and novels usually known as Lord Dunsany, and grandson of his half-Brazilian namesake, British Indian Army Lieutenant Colonel Randal Plunkett.

He is descended from the Earls of Jersey, and the family of explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton.

On the maternal side, his family traces its origins through centuries of Brazilian history, to key figures from the founding days of Brazil as a Portuguese territory, Vasco da Gama and Pedro Álvares Cabral.

His grandfather was a colonel turned architect.

He also has two aunts and an uncle.

He has mentioned that while he would not be a deep fan of his great-grandfather's work, he would see some parallels of interests between his film work and the 18th Lord Dunsany's imaginative writings.

Plunkett secured external private funding for his next film, a post-apocalyptic horror movie Out There, co-writing the script with his brother Oliver.