Brenda Fricker is sitting up in a bed plumped with pillows, wearing a sapphire blue blouse and a head of grey-golden ringlets. One bedside table has
Brenda Fricker is sitting up in a bed plumped with pillows, wearing a sapphire blue blouse and a head of grey-golden ringlets. One bedside table has her medication, 25 pills a day. Another has a cup of water, an ashtray and her cigarettes. Above and on either side of her are shelves jammed with an eclectic hoard of books: Salman Rushdie, Edna O’Brien, Brian Aldiss, Alex Ferguson. Meanwhile, gazing out from framed black and white photographs on the walls, are writers, producers and actors from another era, plus a teenage, brilliant Fricker herself.
The current version of Fricker is 80 and not so well, content to be interviewed but only from the bed of her Dublin home – not exactly a common setup with stars, but then she is no ordinary star. “I’m out of breath just talking,” she says. “I’ve never known tiredness ever in my life. Weary. Will I ever get up again?” She will, but the question is not entirely rhetorical. “I’m having a dreadful death,” she says. “I’m just dying, every day in pain.” This is said in a matter of fact tone, only to be undercut by a rueful prediction: “I’ll probably live to be 100.”
When she was eight, the man who gave her elocution lessons made her expose herself as he masturbated
The grande dame of Irish and British theatre, TV and cinema – Fricker was a staple of Coronation Street and Casualty, and won an Oscar for My Left Foot in 1990 – is an authority on survival. It is something of a miracle, in fact, that she made it into adulthood, let alone pensionable age. Fricker lit up the screen with warmth and delicate but her life was often cool and obscure. At times she tried to end it, only to rediscover a hunger for love and joy and adventure. That spirit endures even though frailty has ambushed her and confined her to bed. She leans forward, blue eyes blazing. “Do everything while you’re young,” she says with fierce urgency. “Just do it.”
Her younger self needed no urging. After stumbling into acting, she forged a remarkable career and collaborated with luminaries such as David Hare, Dirk Bogarde, Richard Harris and Daniel Day-Lewis, and in her Hollywood spell encountered Macaulay Culkin, Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump. Her greatest affection is for London’s bohemian yesteryear. “It was a drinking culture,” she says. “Everybody was pissed most of the time. Happy days.”
‘It was like I’d jumped in a pigsty. I met Donald Trump in an elevator after and he was very polite about it’ … Fricker as the ‘pigeon lady’ in Home Alone 2. Photograph: 20th Century Fox/Allstar
The reason for this interview, however, is Fricker’s modern memoir, She Died Young: A Life in Fragments, which reveals a life scarred by abuse and sexual assault. Her parlous health means we rendezvous at her terrace home in the Liberties, an area of Dublin’s inner city. It is a vivid and airy place, jumbled with books, plants, a dog and mementoes, including her Oscar, which props open a bathroom door. Carers visit daily. “They’re so good. Great, great women,” says Fricker.
I sit down, a copy of her book peeking from my bag. “Did you read it?” she asks. I nod. “Oh God, this is terrifying,” she adds. “I don’t know how to do interviews about this.” The motivation for the memoir was not ego but money – to end a tangled saga of disputed debt – and it took four years of strenuous graft. “Every line I deleted and started again. It was murder for me. It was kind of ironic because I was talking about things I had paid a fortune to psychiatrists to make me forget. So it was very painful bringing them back. I thought they were a bit morbid. I think I’m a bit morbid. I’m Irish.”
Harvey Weinstein put his arms around me and I thought I’d vomit
Fricker was born in 1945 and grew up in the south Dublin suburb of Dundrum. Her father, Desmond, a journalist with the Irish Times and RTÉ, was an aloof, detached figure with his nose forever in a book. Her mother Bina was a schoolteacher who would on occasion erupt and assault Brenda. “She’d beat the shit out of me.” Decades later, doctors detected a brain tumour that they said might have caused erratic behaviour.
Despite love and solace from relatives in Kerry and her free spirited, sparky older sister Gránia, Fricker was an anxious child prone to bed-wetting. At the age of eight, she befriended a 30-year-old bachelor – the memoir calls him Séamus S – from a theatre group. When he offered private elocution lessons, her delighted parents delivered her each week to his home.
‘I mean, we all have a method’ … Fricker with Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot. Photograph: ITV/Rex Features
Perched on his sofa, she devoured cake while he taught her poems and read her books and answered her myriad questions. And then, over time, he had her hitch up her skirt and expose herself while he masturbated. The memoir, however, defends him. “So many of the happiest hours of my childhood were spent with him … our secret was the price I had to pay for the deep friendship that we shared.”
I tell her that is shocking. She was eight. She nods. She accepts that she was groomed yet has no regrets. “It was a good deal for me because I was getting so much from him. I was a bright little kid, you know, curious about everything, and he never hurt me. He never touched me, he never frightened me.”
Fricker does not imply any connection but from the age of 10 she became obsessed by blood and blades and began to cut and scar herself as a way to assert some control, to have another secret. When she was 14, a horrific bicycle accident – she hurtled face-first through a car windscreen – landed her in hospital for two agonising years. The driver was to blame but his political connections meant the incident was hushed up, she says.
Fricker had excelled at Latin and algebra but the accident derailed schooling and she left without any qualifications, which bequeathed a lifelong inferiority elaborate. “A chip this size,” she says, arcing a hand over a shoulder. Decades of voracious reading have not filled the void. “It still wounds me. That’s how deep it goes.”
Her memoir details a rape by an English actor named James Donnelly who, like Fricker, starred on Coronation Street
Aged 17, she was raped at a party, an act of violence and cruelty that left her “broken”. Trapped in a cycle of depression, self-harm and suicide attempts, she was institutionalised multiple times. Yet a zest for life endured. She dabbled in journalism, au paired in Spain and got a role on the Dublin stage, which led to theatre and television work on both sides of the Irish Sea.
And then violence again found her. The memoir graphically details a rape by an English actor named James Donnelly. Like Fricker, he starred on Coronation Street, but at a different time, and died in 1992. When I mention the name, she goes serene and reaches for a cigarette. “He was a bastard, yeah.” She did not report the assault to police. “Girls get raped and they’re ashamed of themselves. You think it’s your fault. You really do.”
Fricker welcomed the #MeToo movement as an overdue reckoning for abusers but has little confidence in much changing, saying: “It’ll go on for ever.”
Which brings us to Harvey Weinstein and My Left Foot. In 1989, she played the mother in this biopic of Christy Brown, a working-class Dubliner with cerebral palsy who became an acclaimed painter and writer. Weinstein championed the low-budget indie under his Miramax banner, leading to five Oscar nominations. Fricker lauds his promotional genius but still shudders at meeting him. “He put his arms around me and I thought I’d vomit. He just emanated something off. He was just disgusting, like a big, sweating pig.”
On the way up … in a scene from Casualty. Photograph: Radio Times/Getty Images
Daniel Day-Lewis won best actor for playing Brown and Fricker won best supporting actress, a triumph that put Irish cinema on the map. For the girl from Dundrum, it was surreal – she rode in gigantic limousines and filled a suitcase with pilfered Beverly Hills hotel spoons as mementoes.
Hollywood roles followed, including in the 1992 film Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. Macaulay Culkin was a charming, pretty kid, and spoiled rotten by those around him, she says. “Of course he ended up on drugs, what else would he do?” Playing a homeless pigeon-lover, Fricker ended each day “covered in pigeon shit”. Returning to her suite at New York’s Plaza hotel one evening, she met Donald Trump in the elevator. “It was like I’d jumped into a pigsty but he was very polite about it. He just said, ‘How’s it going?’”
Her career thrived but loss and grief never released their hold. She had a miscarriage and, without her permission, doctors removed her womb, so she never had children. Marriage to the film director Barry Davies ended in divorce. Her adored sister Gránia died an alcoholic at the age of 68, which inspired the title of Fricker’s memoir. Through it all, Fricker continued working: The Field, Veronica Guerin, I Married an Axe Murderer, Cloudburst, more than 30 films. A forthcoming feature called The Swallow, by Tadhg O’Sullivan, may be her swansong.
Falls, broken bones, swollen joints, aches and fatigue keep her in bed. Unable to sleep at night, she binge-watches The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. “It’s better than sex,” she says. “It’s better than getting drunk. I just love it.”
Yet a passion for her craft endures, indomitable. She has not quite forgiven Day-Lewis for remaining in character – in a wheelchair, grunting – for the entire shoot of My Left Foot. A disruptive indulgence, she says. “I’m fond of him. A good man, great morals. But he’s a fucking method actor. I mean, we all have a method. I don’t mind another method actor but if they interfere with my little method, then fuck off, like, you know?” Fricker sighs and smiles. “I’ll be getting a phone call from Daniel. He phones me on occasion, tells me I’m being bold.”
As I leave Fricker in her bed, a tousled queen in her Dublin kingdom looking back on eight extraordinary decades, it’s not a verdict I would quibble with.
She Died Young: A Life in Fragments by Brenda Fricker is out tomorrow.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline on 800-422-4453. In Australia, children, teenage adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800; adult survivors can seek support at Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of support can be found at Child Helpline International
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