Actress Brenda Fricker: ‘My mother would punch me in the face — she couldn’t control herself’

By Max Lee On Sep 17, 2022 43 0

Brenda Fricker has achieved a lot in her long and varied career and is now writing her memoir.

he book, which she has been working on for two years, will detail her lifelong battle with depression, her experience of self-harm and the years of physical abuse suffered at the hands of her mother.

Speaking exclusively to the Sunday Independent, Fricker said her mother would “punch me in the face” and inflict a litany of other abuse on her.

She spent years trying to make sense of the experiences and eventually sought therapy.

Eventually, Cork-based film producer David Puttnam gave her the courage to put pen to paper: “He told me, ‘it’s the only way you will ever get it out of your system’.”

The Oscar-winning actress, who has starred in hugely successful movies, including My Left Foot, The Field and Home Alone 2, says the process of writing has unearthed repressed memories. “I am trying to understand why she did it. I still don’t understand it but when she saw me, she couldn’t control herself.”

Fricker says she also feels “guilty” sharing her past because her mother was also a good woman who showed kindness to people in her community. “I was the only one who seemed to trigger this in her. And if you flip that coin, I was the one who was her pride and joy. As opposed to my sister.

“She turned me into a doll and gave me the curly hair and the ribbons and my poor sister had her hair scrapped back all the time and was never allowed to do anything. And yet she was the bright and interesting one.”

She says she has since been prescribed over two dozen tablets a day for depression. On the “poisonous” illness, she says: “I have had it since I was 14 and when it hits you, you are in an awful dark place, and you have to learn techniques to survive.”

Over the years, her attempts to deal with the pain have resulted in physical self-harm. Fricker recalls wanting whatever was “tormenting” her to stop: “But this thing of cutting your wrists and wanting blood and the desperation in that — all you get is shame, shame, shame, shame.”

Actress Brenda Fricker. Picture by Dave Meehan

Asked if she ever felt the need to punish herself because that was her default experience as a child, she says: “It’s a good question, a good thought. The pain was just so unbearable, I could not take one more second and I had to release it somehow.”

Fricker was speaking ahead of the broadcast of the eagerly awaited murder-mystery drama Holding, in which she plays housekeeper Lizzie Meany, on Virgin Media tomorrow night. The adaptation of Graham Norton’s novel also stars Game of Thrones actor Conleth Hill and Pauline McLynn.

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Filmed in Skibbereen, Co Cork, Fricker travelled 40km each morning for 12 hour days of filming because she could only find one hotel that would allow her to share the room with her dog, Juno. Although previously retired from filming, the 77-year-old took on the role “because somebody has to pay the milkman”. Her finances are a difficult subject for her and she says she was in her 50s and planning to retire when she discovered her life savings had been decimated.

Although declining to go on the record about her experience, for legal reasons, she said: “I had five pounds under a half a million saved and then I was told I had not one single brown penny in the bank.

“I can distinctly remember the moment I went out to my father and told him what my bank manager had said and I remember him putting down his book, thinking for a moment and saying, ‘You have no love of money Brenda, you will be all right’.

“I went to Dollymount Strand and must have walked it half a dozen times and I realised he’s right. I’m strong enough to go back to work and I did. Part of the reason I am writing the book is to pay the bills.”

Fricker still lives in The Liberties in Dublin where she has turned three cottages into one home.

She keeps her Oscar as a doorstop to her toilet and stays in regular contact with director Jim Sheridan whom she says she “would crawl over cut glass to work with again”.

In recent years, ageing has made her think more about her own mortality. Asked where she would like to be buried, she says “There is a joke there’s a spot waiting for me in Deansgrange where I’ll be with my mother. There is something very funny about being flung together again.”

‘Holding’ is on Virgin Media One at 9pm tomorrow

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