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Brenda Fricker, the first Irish actress to win an Academy Award, died Thursday after a period of ill health,” her agent told The Hollywood Reporter. She was 81. Fricker won her Oscar for 1989’s My Left Foot, which also earned Daniel Day Lewis his first Oscar. “I hate that phrase, ‘You’re the first Irish woman’,” she told RTE Radio last 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.” Fricker is also beloved by ‘90s kids for playing the Pigeon Lady in Home Alone 2.
,Born in 1945 in Dublin, Fricker began acting at the age of 19. In her memoir, she details the pain she experienced in her pre-acting life. She was assaulted by her mother, groomed by a teacher when she was 8, crashed her bike through a car’s windshield at 14, and was sexually assaulted at 17.
,Fricker had intended on being a reporter, working as an assistant to the art editor of The Irish Times. She became an actress “by chance,” when an RTE exec approached her to appear on Ireland’s first soap opera, Tolka Row. In the ‘70s and ’80s, she played nurses on British mainstays Coronation Street and Casualty. She left Casualty to play Bridget Fagan Brown, mother of disabled artist Christy Brown in My Left Foot. The film was a watershed moment for the Irish film industry, with Dublin International Film Festival director Grainne Humphreys going so far as to tell Reuters “The country’s film industry is built on the back of the success of My Left Foot.”
,Fricker won an Academy Award for for Best Supporting Actress for the role of Bridget Brown. She thanked the real life woman in her speech, saying anybody who gives birth 22 times deserves one of these.”
,After her Oscar win, Fricker kept working steadily over the decades. She appeared as Mike Myers’ mother in So I Married an Axe Murderer, as Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s surrogate mother in Angels in the Outfield, and as the misunderstood Pigeon Lady in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. She had a supporting role in 2012’s Albert Nobbs, earning her an Irish Film & Television Awards nomination.
,Fricker probably would not like the tributes that are pouring out today. “Someone said to me the other day, ‘You know what the first words of your obituary will be — ‘Academy Award winner,’ that will be the first three words.’ I can’t escape them,” Fricker once said (per THR). In a retrospective on her career, Sheridan acknowledged her iconoclastic nature. “She was vibrant and full of life and had her own opinions,” he said. “She took no prisoners, let’s put it that way.”
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