Brenda Fricker: From Trauma to Oscar Triumph

BRENDA Fricker’s last act was in a hospice in the city that she loved and lived in, despite her meteoric success on the stage and screen.

The 81-year-old was the first Irish woman to win a Best Actress Oscar for her 1989 role as Christy’s Brown’s mother Bridget in My Left Foot.

Until this year, she was the only Irish actress to have achieved that feat, one she happily shared when  got a gong for Hamnet in March.

It is unlikely, however, that Jessie uses her statuette to hold open the door of her bathroom but that’s exactly how Brenda treated her Oscar in her Liberties house. It might have been glitzy but this down-to-earth woman made sure it was also practical.

In all her years on the planet, and having achieved so much, Brenda was always open, honest and a true Dubliner who never forgot her roots.

Born in Dundrum on February 17, 1945, her father Desmond was a journalist with the Irish Times and RTÉ. Her mother Bina was a schoolteacher but suffered from serious mental health problems and beat both Brenda and her elder sister Grania.

‘This wasn’t just a slap around the head,’ the actress said in an interview with Miriam O’Callaghan. ‘She used to pick branches from the trees and peel the outer skin to the bare thing inside and she would beat the backside off you and she’d hit you with the hoover.

‘She was a violin player and she’d whack you with the violin bow. We were always bleeding. She’d always do below the knees so my father wouldn’t see it when you had kneesocks on.

‘I was petrified of her. Every time she moved it was to hit you. It was extremely violent.’

It was a tough upbringing and in her memoir, She Died Young: A Life In Fragments – the title referring to her sister, who died from alcoholism aged 68 – Brenda revealed a number of incidents of rape and sexual abuse that led to a cycle of self-harm and depression.

She admitted the man who taught her elocution at the age of eight was grooming her but insisted he had not harmed her.

At the age of 14 she was cycling her bike when she was hit by a car and went through the windscreen, leaving her with injuries that would see her spend two years in hospital, which derailed her schooling, something she said she still regretted at the age of 80.

In an interview last year she said of her lack of qualifications: ‘It still wounds me. That’s how deep it goes.’

At the age of 17, she was raped at a party and as a result suffered badly with her mental health. She often spoke about her predilection to depression and was institutionalised many times.

Brenda was vociferous in speaking about mental illness at a time when it was still a taboo subject and helped to open up the conversation about it in an interview on morning radio with Gay Byrne.

‘Gay wanted someone to talk about depression, because it really was a dirty, dirty secret,’ Brenda said in an interview with the Irish Mail in 2015.

‘It was never talked about. So I did talk about it on the radio. It was amazing,’ she said, adding that people still approached her about it.

‘I’m not saying I was personally responsible, but it helped to bring it above board.’

After working for a while in a number of different careers, including journalism, Brenda stumbled into acting when a director who had seen her as a child offered her a part in the TV soap Tolka Row.

‘I was sitting in my office trying to be a reporter,’ she recalled. ‘My boss said: “Go and try it – the job will be here for you. You’re only young once.” So I went and tried it, and here I am.’

Other parts here and in England followed, including as a nurse in Coronation Street and then as Nurse Megan Roach in BBC hospital drama Casualty, which made her recognisable outside Ireland.

But in her memoir, Brenda also detailed a brutal rape at the hands of an English actor named James Donnelly, who died in 1992.

‘Girls get raped and they’re ashamed of themselves,’ she said in an interview last year. ‘You think it’s your fault. You really do.’

She fell in love and married film and television producer Barry Davis, a contemporary of Mick Jagger, in 1979. She was with him until 1988, when she divorced him, although in later interviews she insisted she always loved him.

As a couple they experienced five miscarriages before doctors removed Brenda’s womb, leaving her unable to have children.

But it was the fact that Barry was an alcoholic that pushed Brenda to divorce him.

‘He was always a wonderful interesting lovely man,’ she said in an interview. ‘He became an alcoholic and I couldn’t live with it. I thought, I will divorce him and see if that frightens him but it didn’t. We kept seeing each other. We were madly in love.

‘One day he fell down the stairs and died. And that was the end of that.’

She insisted that even though she and Barry divorced, they never became unmarried.

‘The love is still alive in my heart,’ she said in 2012.

Before 1989, Brenda had a considerable career in television on both sides of the Irish Sea but it was her role as Bridget Brown, the mother of Christy, in Jim Sheridan’s biopic My Left Foot that brought her international success.

Both she and her co-star Daniel Day Lewis won Academy Awards for the Irish film about an artist and writer who had cerebral palsy.

It was a role that Brenda believed pushed forward and challenged her as an actress but what came with the victory was fame, something that didn’t sit well with her.

‘I was vaguely aware that it was something that happened in America, but no one back home in Ireland had one,’ she said of her Oscar. ‘It changed my life because until then I was completely unknown, and suddenly the whole world knew my name.

‘I found my sudden fame like going through the eye of a storm. It was quite frightening.’

It was also this moment that spurred the oft-repeated quote that Brenda said after finding herself described as a ‘British’ actress, a trope that persists with our talent to this day.

‘When you’re lying drunk at an airport, the papers say you’re Irish, but when you win an Oscar, they claim you’re British,’ she said at the time.

The film’s champion was Miramax mogul Harvey Weinstein, who was subsequently . Brenda said he had always made her feel a sense of unease.

‘All you have to do is look at him, sit beside him to feel what I felt, a physical disgust and a desire to change seat,’ she said, adding that as an older woman she worried about the young actresses in his area and admired those who took a stand against him.

‘I worked with Ashley Judd in A Time To Kill and spent time with her mom and sisters. A really lovely family, with Ashley being the shy, more fragile one. It must have been so frightening to stand up and expose a predator like him. He was hugely powerful. She must have been terrified.

‘Isn’t it wonderful that her courage won through?’

Winning an Oscar opened doors to another world of acting in Hollywood on huge budget productions where Brenda thrived. Even though she might not have recognised it in herself, Brenda’s talent was exceptional.

She had the ability to break hearts with a facial expression, to move an audience with an eyebrow raise.

Hers was acting that was powerful in its understatement.

Her roles were wide-ranging from The Field to playing the pigeon lady in Home Alone 2, a part that has made her recognisable to generations.

But it was Brenda who managed to change the character into the iconic figure who is a favourite with so many children.

‘What I love about working in America is you’re allowed to have input,’ she said of the role. ‘You’re not allowed that in Ireland, you’re told to shut up and say the lines.

‘When that script came originally, they had this Irish sort of wino sitting on the subway or something, and I thought, that would be a lovely part if it wasn’t like that. So I talked to them and [director Chris Columbus] said, “come over, we’ll talk”, so I did.

‘They were right on for it. They said, “ok, what do we do?” They changed the whole thing around and they had her living above the music hall and they had her loving music and they had her completely changed. I thought it was much more influential for a young kid to meet someone who was intelligent and educated.’

In 2012, the actress revealed that she was struggling with money, despite working continually.

In a TV interview with actress Anna Friel, who she starred with in 2003 film Watermelon she said: ‘I lived off my savings but now I’m broke. But as long as I’ve a roof over my head and can feed the dog, I’m perfectly content.’

That contentment was hard-won – after 50 years of suffering from depression and more than 32 suicide attempts, in later years Brenda said she had found the solution, was a combination of medication, therapy and Mozart.

Two years later, in 2014, she said she was in a better place financially, though last year she admitted that she wrote her memoir primarily for cash. Brenda also subscribed to the notion of assisted dying and initially signed up to Dignitas.

‘Your life is the only thing you own and if you don’t like it and you are seriously sick, you have the choice of suicide which only involves yourself or you have euthanasia which involves a doctor,’ she said in 2010. ‘I absolutely believe it is the right thing.’

There were plenty of joyful things in Brenda’s life too. She loved acting and loved playing snooker – she had quite the talent for it. She loved dogs and Guinness and in recent years enjoyed watching The Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills.

She conducted her last interview from her bed in her terraced house in the Liberties and died peacefully in a hospice in her beloved Dublin at the age of 81, two years after making her last film, The Swallow. Made by Tadgh O’Sullivan, it tells the story of a woman who writes a letter in which she meditates on memory and the role art plays in immortalising those who make it.

There is no doubt this role has an added poignancy, now that Ireland has lost one of its greatest.

Like its owner, Brenda’s Oscar has led a life of light and shade, but one that has never been without adventure.

‘It has had a very travelled life,’ she said at one point of her statuette. ‘It has been lost in the back of taxis and it’s been left in ladies’ rooms, it’s been thrown in the swimming pool when we were all drunk, it’s been left in pubs. I used to carry it around in a carrier bag because people would want to see it.

‘Eventually people pressured me saying, “Would you ever put a shelf up”, and I’m quite embarrassed by it being up there because I don’t like looking at it.’

And so she consigned Oscar to becoming the most coveted doorstop in cinema history.