Melvin Bernhardt was a director best known for his Tony Award-winning play Da, which ran for nearly 700 performances on Broadway. Da won in the categories of best play, best director, best actor and best featured actor. It follows the story of a young Irishman who is visited by ghosts and memories of his family on the occasion of his father’s burial.

Bernhardt also directed two Pulitzer Prize-winning dramas: Paul Zindel’s 1970 The Effect Of Gamma Rays On Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds and Beth Henley’s 1980 Crimes of the Heart.

In addition, he contributed to several episodes of the daytime dramas One Life to Live and Another World, as well as the 1984 television movie Mister Roberts, adapted from the play by Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan about a navy cargo ship during World War II, which starred Robert Hays, Kevin Bacon and Charles Durning.

Bernhardt died September 12, 2015, in New York City. He was 84.