Brenda Fricker, the Dublin-born actress who became the first Irish woman to win an Academy Award and later charmed a generation of families as the Pigeon Lady in “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York,” died Thursday night in Dublin after a period of ill health. She was 81.
Her agent, Phil Belfield, confirmed the death and said Fricker would be deeply missed across the industry. “We will never see her like again and the world is lesser for the lack of her,” he said. “I was honoured to know, love and work with her, and she will always have a place in my heart and in the heart of so many film and TV fans the world over.”
Fricker won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1990 for her role as Bridget Brown, the fiercely determined mother of artist Christy Brown, in Jim Sheridan’s “My Left Foot.” Daniel Day-Lewis took home the Best Actor award that same night for playing Christy, a writer and painter with cerebral palsy who could control only his left foot. Fricker’s win made her the first Irish woman ever to claim an acting Oscar, cementing her place in her country’s cultural history.
Born in 1945 in the south Dublin suburb of Dundrum, Fricker trained briefly as a journalist before joining Dublin’s Gate Theatre, then run by Micheál MacLiammóir. She built a reputation on stage with the Abbey Theatre and in London at the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Court, while television audiences knew her from her long-running role as nurse Megan Roach on the BBC medical drama “Casualty.”
Hollywood soon followed. Beyond “My Left Foot,” Fricker appeared in “So I Married an Axe Murderer,” “Angels in the Outfield” and “A Time to Kill,” but it was her turn as the kindly, disheveled Pigeon Lady who befriends a stranded Kevin McCallister in Central Park that introduced her to millions of younger viewers. Her most recent screen work came in Tadhg O’Sullivan’s experimental film “The Swallow,” which her agent said captured “the truth and majesty of Brenda as an actor.”
Fricker was married to director Barry Davis from 1979 to 1988 and endured six miscarriages during that time, an experience she said left her with lasting depression. Last year she published a bestselling memoir, “She Died Young: A Life in Fragments,” in which she wrote candidly about surviving childhood sexual abuse and later struggles with alcoholism, saying the writing process took four painful years to complete.
