By Jacob Stolworthy
Copyright independent
Oscar-winning actor Brenda Fricker has said she is having “a dreadful death” in a rare interview.
The 80-year-old Irish star, who won Best Supporting Actress for My Left Foot in 1990, has opened up about her health struggles after being confined to her bed in Dublin.
Fricker said she spends every day in pain and gets out of breath just talking, stating: “I’ve never known tiredness ever in my life”
The “weary” former Coronation Street and Casualty star, who is also known for playing the pigeon lady in Home Alone 2, said that she asks herself: “Will I ever get up again?”
“I’m having a dreadful death,” Fricker told The Guardian. ”I’m just dying – every day in pain,” she said, wryly adding: “I’ll probably live to be 100.”
The actor didn’t go into specifics, but said that when she’s unable to sleep, she watches The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills: “It’s better than sex. It’s better than getting drunk. I just love it.”
Fricker also revealed that she occasionally gets a phone call from Daniel Day-Lewis, her co-star in My Left Foot, the biopic of Christy Brown, a man born with cerebral palsy who could control only his left foot.
Fricker, whose other credits include The Field, So I Married an Axe Murderer and Veronica Guerin, originally retired from acting in 2014 after six decades, having started out in the late 1970s playing nurses in Coronation Street and Casualty.
However, in 2021, she agreed to a role in Holding, the series based on Graham Norton’s debut novel, as well as Channel 5 series The Catch.
Fricker also provided the voice of a deceased character in the 2023 film The Miracle Club.
While discussing her Christmas plans, Fricker told Radio 1 in 2021: “I would be lying if I said it would be a nice and happy Christmas because I’m old and I live alone. It can be very dark.”
She continued: “I turn the phone off and put the blinds down. I do pre-record some good programmes and I have my dog and I get myself through it that way.
“I don’t want to be sounding kind of negative but it is a different kind of Christmas, that’s all. While I don’t find Christmas all that difficult, what I do find difficult is New Year’s Eve.”
Fricker has written a new memoir, titled She Died Young.
