The extraordinary rush of sorrow that has engulfed the nation following the death of Brenda Fricker speaks to a personality who, born in 1945, offered a solid link between the new Ireland and the old. Most obituaries began by noting that, in 1990, she became the first Irish woman to win an acting Oscar. That best-supporting-actor prize, for playing the mother of Daniel Day-Lewis’s Christy Brown in My Left Foot, kicked off a decade that, in cultural terms, changed Ireland more than any since the foundation of the State. Mary Robinson was elected president later the same year. Riverdance struck in 1994. Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins came along in 1995. Histories will surely place that Oscar evening at one end of a busy arc.She, nonetheless, remained a down-to-earth Dubliner, connected to the people and the culture. Early roles included a spell in Tolka Row, the nation’s first soap opera, and a brief turn in Coronation Street before wider recognition came with a regular part in the BBC series, Casualty. But her finest screen performance may have been as the desperate Bridie in Pat O’Connor’s heartbreaking 1982 film of William Trevor’s The Ballroom of Romance for BBC and RTÉ. Following a still youngish woman as, fearful the clock is ticking, she compares and contrasts unpromising potential husbands at a rural hop in the 1950s, O’Connor’s film occupied a milieu that had not yet fully vanished. Fricker remembered that past, but was very much part of the coming change.She lived a tough life. In recent years, following the publication of a heart-breaking memoir, she talked us through a grim history of parental abuse and sexual violence. She continued to create characters of unchallengeable grit, right up to a late performance in Tadhg O’Sullivan’s experimental The Swallow from 2024.Former president Michael D Higgins said she would be most remembered for “the wide range and versatility of the roles she took, and above all, her reputation among fellow actors for kindness, generosity and support”. The massed mourning should surprise nobody.