I’m sitting in Brenda Fricker’s big and peaceful ground-floor bedroom. The 80-year-old star of The Field and My Left Foot is sitting up in her bed. I’m in the chair beside it as she tells me about her beautiful but raw memoir, She Died Young: A Life in Fragments.
She has had health problems recently. When she started writing the book, “I was 76 and healthy. And I went down to Galway with Deirdre Nuttall,” she says, referring to her collaborator on the memoir. “She was going to tell me how to write a book. We signed in to the hotel and said, ‘Let’s take a walk down by the seaside,’ and I fell.
“And that was the first fall out of 11. Both shoulders broken, this one three times. I can show you the scar. A psychiatrist I work with in Beaumont, he said, ‘I think, Brenda, this is a subtle attempt to get out of writing the book.’”
Fricker’s house is three cottages in Dublin 8 that have been turned into one. She points out pictures on the wall of her beloved Aunt Nonee, with whom she would stay in Kerry as a child, and her grandnephew. “I love the bones of him,” she says. There’s also a photograph of her as a teenager beside the bed. It’s on the cover of the book. “That was the day I was told I had TB.”
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Her dog, Juno, comes into the room from time to time. “She had a Paycock, who sadly died some years ago. It’s said Mr O’Casey himself had a fondness for dogs.”
There are a lot of books in the room, too. Fricker reads a lot but says, “I’m just showing off because I’m insecure and had no education. You can say I have a chip on my shoulder.”
She’s funny and warm and curious, with a propensity for occasional off-the-record storytelling. She affectionately refers to me as a rocker. “I made inquiries about you,” she says.
Fricker is nervous to hear what I think of the memoir. It’s a very moving book that deals with upsetting things: parental abuse, sexual violence, tuberculosis, serious mental health struggles, and miscarriages. There’s joy, too: wild times with her sister, Gránia, in Spain, performing music in New York pubs with her friend Anne, the joy of being in a theatre or on a set. She’s touched that I read it all.
“None of this was planned,” she says. “Nothing in my life was planned ... I fell in love with words through Ena Burke” – her childhood drama teacher – “and language and poetry. She’d divide us into groups of six and would tell us to write and perform a play.”
She met her friend Joan Bergin, the triple Emmy-winning costume designer, in that class. She wanted to write a whole chapter on Bergin’s success, she says.
After school Fricker got a job as a trainee reporter at The Irish Times and spent a lot of time drinking with actors and writers in the nearby Pearl bar, on Fleet Street. There, one day, she was told that Micheál MacLiammóir, the Gate Theatre founder, needed an actor for a small role, and her career began.
Fricker has no pretensions about her craft, rooting it all in good writing. “Something comes into their head and they write it down and it’s from their brain and their life,” she says. “They write scenes and people and beginnings and ends and they give it to you. You’re just a middleman, really ... You want to speak the words out loud, because they’re beautiful.
“You read that and I read this and we play a game ... That’s all you do. It’s that simple. As an actor you’re not an artist, but you’re surrounded by arty people. That makes it a good place to be ... I still just think of it as playing games.”
Why is she good at it? “I’m not sure I was ever good at it. I enjoy it.”
But she’s clearly very talented – she won an Oscar. She laughs. Her main aim with the book, she says, was to write it without once mentioning “the Oscar word”. It slipped into the final version. “I was livid,” she says.
Fricker largely steers clear of celebrity stories in the memoir, though there is a funny chapter about her growing irritation with Daniel Day-Lewis’s refusal to drop out of character on the set of My Left Foot, in which he played the writer and artist Christy Brown, who was born with cerebral palsy. (They both won Academy Awards for their roles in Jim Sheridan’s feature.) “Daniel will ring me now and say, ‘Brenda, I love you far too much to give out to you.’”
For the most part her memoir circles much darker things. Her father, Des, an Irish Times writer and RTÉ broadcaster, was neglectful, and her mother, Bina, a language teacher, was horrifically violent towards her.
“It was real violence, and I needed protection,” Fricker says. “Where was my father? I worshipped him. There was evidence. There was blood all over me. Blood seeping through the socks. He saw that. It’s hard to explain. Somebody should have inquired, ‘What’s going on here?’ In those days you didn’t interfere with your neighbours.”
Her sister, Gránia, who is older, was her saviour. “I adored her.” She recites a line from a poem she wrote about how she would climb under the kitchen table and how Gránia “stood in front and took the blows that Bina meant for me”.
When her mother died of a brain tumour, Gránia asked a surgeon who had operated on her, “‘Could that come with violence?’ and he said, ‘very possibly’. We took that as some kind of comfort.”
If that weren’t enough hardship for anyone, at the age of 14 Fricker was in a horrific car crash that she needed two years to recover from. It was, she claims, the car of the Fianna Fáil minister Frank Aiken, although she isn’t sure if that’s who was driving. “It broke my parents.” In the book she suggests that the establishment closed ranks and protected him.
In her later teens she had TB and spent time in a sanatorium. Both instances knocked out several crucial years of development. “I missed out on a lot,” she says.
How did it affect her? “I think I had a much greater capacity for happiness as a child. I don’t know where I lost that.”
She thinks for a moment and changes her mind. “I have a great capacity for happiness, actually.”
Fricker also writes about two horrific rapes she experienced as a young woman, both of which she describes in upsetting detail. How was the experience of writing about them after all these years? “You don’t want to be writing that. It was very, very hard. Weeping and gnashing of teeth, as they say. It was very hard.”
Her relationship with her late ex-husband, the director Barry Davis, is painted very lovingly in the book. She tells me how sensitive he was when they first got together. “The man was amazing. Truly amazing.” He showed her that love could be “so beautiful and there’s so much joy. I’d never have known that without him. That was a huge thing.”
They parted ways ultimately because of his alcoholism, but they stayed friends. “He taught me respect ... I definitely loved Barry, no doubt about that. But the drink, the drink, the drink. After we had the divorce we went to the pictures. It was a tragedy, the drink.”
He died at the age of 54 after falling down the stairs. “He had nobody with him and wasn’t found until Monday. How long is a minute when you’re dying? It was very sad.”
Her sister died in her sleep. “The only reason we think she wasn’t in turmoil is she had her arms around one of her dogs, and in the morning the dog was still there. If she had tossed and turned the dog wouldn’t have been still there.”
Was writing about the sadder elements in the book cathartic in any way?
She laughs sadly. “No.”
Did she talk to her friends about the things she wrote about in the book? “The maudlin stuff? Sure, we’re all maudlin. We’re Irish ... My friends wouldn’t have known about any of that.” She pauses. “They knew about Séamus S. Which nobody understands.”
Fricker is referring to the chapter of the book I found the most upsetting. Séamus S – not his real name – taught her elocution when she was eight years old. She idolised him, and continues to, even though, as she tells it, he regularly masturbated in her presence.
“I tried to tell the absolute truth about it,” she says. Séamus S encouraged her and taught her and was impressed by her, she says. “I never got anything from my father. I got nothing from my mother. I’d be asking questions all the time, getting on people’s nerves. But I didn’t get on his nerves.
“What he wanted from me never frightened me, never threatened me. He never touched me ... I stayed in touch with him right into adulthood. I’d call him up for advice. There was a lot of friendship there.”
Fricker is worried people will think of him as “a dirty old man”. I tell her I find it troubling that she still feels positively towards him. “I should be a victim?” she asks.
Her attitude towards him seems like the product of grooming. “Maybe. But I wasn’t frightened at all ... How did he groom me?”
I think because she was small and there was a lot of sadness in her life, he knew that giving her things she needed emotionally would mean he could get what he wanted.
“I didn’t think of it that way,” she says. “I know about Patty Hearst syndrome” – aka Stockholm syndrome – “and I know all that stuff. I’m not a fool. I’m just loyal to him.”
Was she worried about including that chapter in the book? “I was more worried about writing about depression, to be honest.”
She Died Young includes a very sad and harrowing stream-of-consciousness chapter in which Fricker depicts what it felt like when she was in the throes of mental distress. She had been self-harming since she was a child. “I think it was self-hate. When you get beaten up and don’t understand it ...”
She links some of it to Catholic imagery and to her mother’s Catholicism. “The Stations of the Cross and the blood, that kind of affected me. It’s hard to know. Part of it was revenge on Bina, too.”
In later life, after 31 suicide attempts and several stints in hospital, Fricker started seeing the acclaimed psychiatrist Dr Anthony Clare. She credits him with healing her. “There was so much pain, but Anthony Clare, I don’t know how he did it, but he just eased it all down for me ... I think a lot of it was actually being able to talk about it and kind of just accepting it.”
How is her depression now? “It’s better. It’s copable. I’m on the strongest antidepressant in the land. I take them and I can cope.”
Beyond these sadder stories, Fricker has had a fascinating life. As I tune an old lute-shaped guitar for her – one she got from a production of Romeo and Juliet – she tells me about how the Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia taught her to play her first few chords.
Despite a tendency towards introversion, she loved the social side of creativity in those early years. “There was far more creative work in my life in that period than there has been ever since,” she says. “It all became really serious, and the fun has gone out of it. You’re more creative when you’re pissed.” She laughs.
[ Thirty years ago, My Left Foot reinvented Irish filmOpens in new window ]
She asks if I ever knew her friend Nell McCafferty, the legendary journalist, who died in 2024. I didn’t. “You’re missing out. She was an amazing woman ... I never had an affair with her. I should have, actually. Everyone thought we had an affair. I loved her very much. She was a wonderful person.”
One of her favourite actors is Dirk Bogarde. She was once meant to work with him on a project, and when he dropped out she sent him an angry, profanity-strewn letter that she includes in the book. She remains mortified by this.
“I still don’t know why he didn’t have me arrested, because the letter I wrote him was so appalling. But we became great buddies then. He became a lovely writer. His letters were beautiful. He wrote me one on a shopping bag. It was beautiful. He just couldn’t find paper. He had a great sense of humour.”
Fricker seems to have an affinity for all kinds of people. She writes with tenderness of the Co Kerry-based relatives by whom she felt truly loved as a child and of the Irish cleaners she once worked with in a hospital in London. “I loved them because we were immigrants together. And they were lost. They were never going home, but they had their dignity and humour.”
Part of the reason Fricker has written She Died Young is financial – she has over the years lost money, she says. She believes her finances weren’t managed as well as they could have been.
After her initial wave of Hollywood success, at the age of 55, she had intended to retire.
“I thought I’d get 10 border collies, walk on Selerna beach” – in Cleggan, Co Galway – “go out to the islands, go down to Coyne’s pub, where you can get the best pint in Ireland, get pissed with the fishermen and walk home and sleep. That was my plan.”
But she no longer had all her savings.
“At 55, starting again as a woman in that business is tough. I had to do things I’d never done ... It’s really hard work. If you get a good editor you might be lucky. I did some films I’m ashamed of and some I’m not ashamed of.”
She names some of the ones she’s proud of, such as Swann, with Miranda Richardson, and So I Married an Axe Murderer, with Mike Myers. “That was great crack.”
Fricker still acts, most recently in The Swallow, Tadhg O’Sullivan’s new film, which she’s also proud of. She did it, she says, “because I liked him very much. He’s very clever. A lovely man.”
[ Donald Clarke reviews The Swallow: Brenda Fricker holds the screen as few others could ]
Writing the book was sometimes painful, but she got joy from it too, she says. She typed much of it on her phone while she was recuperating in bed.
“When I’d get on to a good bit I’d be delighted with myself. There was one night and I couldn’t straighten up because it was nine hours nonstop. Total concentration but no discipline.” She laughs. “My sister used to say, ‘If it’s an emergency, call Brenda. If you want to know what day of the week it is, don’t go near her.’”
Why was it important to tell the darker stories now, at 80? “There are women everywhere in the dark, and I know that reading other people definitely helped me to not feel as alone. You feel like, ‘One other person feels that way.’ If it helps one person, it’s worth it.”
She Died Young: A Life in Fragments is published by Apollo. You can contact Samaritans on freephone 116123 or by email at jo@samaritans.ie. The national rape crisis helpline is on freephone 1800-778888 or at the email address counselling@rcc.ie
