Brenda Fricker and Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, based on the life of the artist Christy Brown. Photograph: Miramax/Everett/Shutterstock View image in fullscreen Brenda Fricker and Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, based on the life of the artist Christy Brown. Photograph: Miramax/Everett/Shutterstock Film Obituary Brenda Fricker obituary Actor who was the first Irish woman to win an Oscar for her role in the 1989 film classic My Left Foot
Prefer the Guardian on Google Brenda Fricker, who has died aged 81, was only the second Irish actor – and the first female one – to win an Oscar, for her role as Daniel Day-Lewis’s mother in the 1989 film My Left Foot, after shooting to fame in the original cast of the BBC medical drama Casualty.
As the nurse Megan Roach, she was the Mother Earth of the fictional Holby City hospital’s A&E department for the programme’s first five series (1986-90). “We knew the show had to have compassion,” said Casualty’s first producer, Geraint Morris . “We made Megan the person everyone could talk to.”
Megan was a workhorse. Although the most experienced nurse, she was the least technically qualified, doing the dirty work, breaking bad news to relatives and biting her lip when doctors put her down.
Fricker decided to move on following an episode in which her character was held hostage by a murderer. “Megan didn’t develop in the way she was meant to,” the actor reflected. “She started off with a sense of humour. But she lost it and all she seemed to do was push a trolley round and offer tea and sympathy.”
The departure also coincided with Fricker’s Oscar win as best supporting actress for her portrayal of the battling, devoted mother of Christy Brown (Day-Lewis) in My Left Foot, based on the autobiography of the Irish artist and writer born with cerebral palsy.
View image in fullscreen Brenda Fricker as the Pigeon Lady in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, 1992. Photograph: Maximum Film/Alamy It was another example of Fricker bringing compassion to the screen. “Christy’s special magic affects no one as much as his mother, played by Brenda Fricker with a low-key luminosity that’s just lovely,” wrote the American critic Bob Strauss.
A string of Hollywood films followed, including Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992). As the Pigeon Lady, a homeless woman living in Central Park who befriends Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin), Fricker again brought depth and poignancy to the screen, providing a counterpoint to the movie’s slapstick.
In contrast, she supplied comedy in So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993), as the eccentric Scottish mother of Mike Myers’s lead character, obsessed with sensational tabloid stories.
After several years, she left Hollywood behind and concentrated on Canadian, British, Irish and other American films and television programmes. In the film Veronica Guerin (2003), she played the mother of the murdered Irish investigative journalist acted by Cate Blanchett.
View image in fullscreen Brenda Fricker in Veronica Guerin, 2003. Photograph: Touchstone/Everett/Shutterstock Over the years, there were several brief returns to Casualty, finally in 2010 with Megan’s diagnosis of terminal cancer. The four-episode story, bringing the issue of assisted dying to a wide audience, saw Fricker reunited with Derek Thompson, who played the staff nurse Charlie Fairhead.
Brenda was born in Dublin to Bina (nee Murphy), a language teacher, and Desmond Fricker, an Irish Times journalist and RTÉ broadcaster. She…