Brenda Fricker, who overcame a harrowing childhood to become the first Irish actress to win an Oscar, taking the prize for her turn as the unwavering mother of Daniel Day-Lewis’ character in My Left Foot, has died. She was 81.
She died Thursday night in Dublin after “a period of ill health,” her agent, Phil Belfield, announced. “We will never see her like again, and the world is lesser for the lack of her,” he said. “I was honored to know, love and work with her, and she will always have a place in my heart and in the heart of so many film and TV fans the world over.”
On doing what no else has ever done at the Oscars, she said: “I hate that phrase, ‘You’re the first Irish woman’,” she told RTE Radio in September. “It’s lovely to have that in the history books, but it’s a burden. People have expectations about it, and I don’t give a shit about it, to be honest with you.”
Resilient onscreen and off, Fricker during her seven-decade career also appeared on Ireland’s first TV soap, Tolka Row, and played a TV nurse on Coronation Street and Casualty, the Pigeon Lady in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992), the paranoid mother of Mike Myers in So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993), the foster home caretaker in Angels in the Outfield (1994) and the cook in Albert Nobbs (2011).
