The Importance of Being Brenda: Brenda Fricker on Her Mental Health Battle

Oscar winning actress Brenda Fricker can still recall the occasion vividly. She felt there was no point in living anymore. Out of sheer desperation, she made a decision to take her own life. In the event, somebody called an ambulance. It was touch and go, but the surgeons managed to save her.

Brenda remembers exactly what went through her mind when she came to, in hospital. “On the serious attempts – I would call them close to the wire – I remember waking up and thinking, ‘Failed!’ And then I’d think, ‘You’ll have to wait and try it again’.”

A BRAVE FACADE
Born in Dublin in 1945, Brenda was the younger of two children. Her mother Bida was a school teacher; her father, Desmond, was a journalist with The Irish Times before working as a PR man. She originally wanted to follow in his footsteps as a writer, but switched to acting when she was offered a part in the 1960s urban TV soap, Tolka Row.

Brenda went on to have a very successful acting career. She is best known to TV viewers for starring in the hospital drama Casualty. More importantly, she made cinematic history when she became the first Irish woman to win an Oscar for her role as Christy Brown’s mother in Jim Sheridan’s powerful My Left Foot.

But the startling truth is that Brenda has been putting on a brave façade for most of her life. Back in 2012, she stunned TV3 viewers when she revealed, on a midday chat show, that she had been suffering from crippling depression for 50 years. Things were so bad, she added, that she attempted suicide a staggering 32 times.

It was, she told me shortly afterwards, an exaggeration.

“That was a mistake,” she confessed. “I might have done something very silly like cut myself, which would just be a cry for help. I don’t think they were serious attempted suicides. They were just screams for help – you got so tired of nobody hearing you that I went and tried it for real. I would say that, out of all of those, there might have been two or three serious attempted suicides.”

Which is still a lot.

“It is a lot. I agree with you. So, basically, I thought I was not worthy of being alive.”

NEGATIVE MEDIA ATTENTION
An email from Brenda popped into my inbox earlier this year. She is warm and likeable, but also capable of being brutally honest. In the email, Brenda revealed that she felt elated to have officially retired from acting. She confirmed that she had made her last appearance, in a 2015 TV show.

She was always uncomfortable with fulfilling the annoying obligations that are part and parcel of being a movie star – whether it’s promoting films on the red carpet at Cannes, going to events like the Oscars, or conducting the humdrum interviews that are always written into movie stars’ contracts when they sign up to make a film. She never enjoyed being in the limelight.

“And it’s getting worse as I get older,” she said. “People think you’re unhappy if you’re reclusive — but I’m not. I was very nervous of meeting people — mainly because of the things my mother said and did to me. I have four or five very close friends, and that’s enough to cope with. If I have to attend red-carpet events, I have to muster up the courage.”

How did she prepare herself for public appearances?

“It was like putting a DVD into the back of my head: you act the part for the night. Put on the face and say what people expect you to say, and smile for the camera – and get out as fast as you can. I don’t mean to be rude about the people who put these things on or anything; I think they’re wonderful, but I’m not just that type of person.”

Back in 2012, during one of her dark periods, Brenda fired off several emails to me over the course of a couple weeks. The emails were always courteous, but they could quickly swing from warm and friendly to downbeat and negative. I remember her once crying on the phone because she was upset about how she felt certain tabloids were treating her.

I won’t pretend to be a friend, but she rang me that day for my two cents worth on how to handle the unwanted media intrusion and I advised her as best I could.

Later that evening, she fired off an email to me, saying, “Fed up thanking you! But, thank you.”

Whatever comfort I might have provided was temporary. Brenda ended up in hospital shortly afterwards. “It’s killing me,” she said. “So, I am stopping. The doctor has written a letter to the people they think are ‘employing’ me because I agreed to give a helping hand where I thought it was needed and would do good.

“The effect all of this is having on my health – I am diabetic and the pressure, plus the tension, combined to put me into hospital for a day-and-a-half. All this has made my health go backwards, after years and years of combined work between me, and a team of doctors. I am truly in pieces. You probably think this an exaggeration. It is not.”

She was upset, in part at least, by what she saw as negative media attention.

“I feel like giving up acting and never communicating with a journalist again... Somewhere inside me I want clarity and revenge – but I want my health more.”

MY SISTER GOT IT WORSE
I mentioned to Brenda that one of the top publishers in Ireland wanted to meet her about writing a memoir.

“I would love to meet him in a healthy state of mind,” she responded. “But I must recharge my batteries which are flat, flat, flat!”

The meeting never took place. At the time, Brenda described herself as semi-reclusive. She would take her rescue dog for long walks in the Phoenix Park. But otherwise, she confided that she loathed going outdoors, preferring to be on her own in her home in the Liberties. There, she’d surf the internet and download songs onto her iPod and read.

“I have a very boring life,” she said. “I like eating and walking and I love learning. My eyesight is beginning to go, so reading is harder. I have to buy those books with big print.”

More recent emails suggest that she’s bounced back from those dark days: the tone of her missives is more upbeat. In an attempt to understand her depression, Brenda recalled the violence in her own home. She remembers her mother Bida as a sadistic woman who often beat her two children.

“She punched me half to death,” Brenda recalled. “She kicked the shit out of me. Some friends that I had said, ‘You can’t be talking like that about your mother’. I said, ‘It’s the truth: it’s not as if I’m telling lies about her’. She took all my confidence away. My sister got it worse actually. She was brighter than I was – she got out quickly.”

Brenda says she’s unsure but she sometimes suspects her father knew about the abuse but turned a blind eye.

Otherwise, she has nothing but praise for her dad.

YOUR MA WAS WONDERFUL
Brenda admits that she is still dealing with the psychological scars of the abuse inflicted upon her as a young child.

“I’m trying to come to terms with that now. I have a very good counsellor who I go and see. I’m trying to forgive her,” she told me at the time. “Looking back on it now with hindsight, I would say that she was deeply troubled mentally in the sense that she was bipolar, as it’s now called, or had manic depression as it was referred to in those days.”

She paused to take a deep breath.

“But there was no one around to help her – doctors didn’t know anything about it. That’s the only explanation I can put on this. That she had two sides to her. And one was adored by people. She was a teacher and during the school holidays all these kids would come up on their bikes to see her because they were mad about her.”
Brenda remembers people coming up to pay their respects at her mother’s funeral.

“Jesus Christ! I can’t believe that Dundrum was practically closed down it was so big – and people coming up to me and saying, ‘Oh, your Ma was wonderful’. She obviously had a side to her that I didn’t see – because at home with me she was very cruel.”

We still love each other. There has been an astonishing number of tragedies in Brenda’s own life — all of which added to the burden that she carried. She endured ‘five or six’ miscarriages.

“I never had huge maternal instincts,” she added, “probably because of my relationship with my mother. I didn’t have any of those callings to be a mother.”

She also nursed her father in his dying days; and she found it painfully difficult when she lost her older sister, Nora, who she describes as her best friend.

“Well, that’s still very raw,” she said about her sister’s death. “She’s dead a few years now, but it feels like a few minutes. You know, you expect your parents to die or maybe your friends, but you never think of your siblings dying. She was five years older than me. I worshipped the ground she walked on. I thought she was brilliant. There’s nobody left now, Jason, who knows me from all my life, They’re all gone. She was the last one.”

Brenda’s husband, TV director Barry Davies – a school contemporary of Mick Jagger – died when he fell down the stairs.

“I would have handled all of those deaths much better if I had a different childhood,” she observed.
Brenda had divorced her husband because of his alcoholism.

“He was really trying,” she explained. “He was going to AA meetings. We were talking about maybe getting married again and then he died. He fell down the stairs — probably with a few drinks on him, I’d imagine.”

She told me that she still loves him after all these years.

“I’ve had one or two little flings, but I still feel loyal to Barry even though he’s dead and even though I divorced him. We never become unmarried,” she pointed out. “I mean, you can get a piece of paper that says that you’re divorced but you don’t ever get unmarried. We still love each other. The love is still alive in my heart.”

Shortly after his death, she went off to the US in 1990 to star in Home Alone 2. But when I asked her when exactly he died, she said something strange. “You know something, Jason? I’ve blocked all that out and deleted it. I spent time with physiatrists trying to remember. I can’t remember when we got married; I can’t remember when he died; I can’t remember any deaths – any dates, my mother, my father. I just wiped it all out.

“One of my least favourite words is closure. I hate when people say, ‘You need to get closure’. That’s the biggest insult to anybody, to have closure and put them out of your mind forever. You learn to live with the fact that they are not there. It’s not just Barry – it’s all the people who died, you have to learn to live without them.”

She too turned to alcohol.

“I did drink a lot – enough for about 14 women in my day! But I don’t drink anymore. I kind of went off it when it started to get a hold on Barry because we were great drinking buddies and he was a great drunk, a good drunk – but he started turning into a nasty drunk.”

In a previous interview, Brenda spoke about how she felt she wasn’t a good wife.

“That would be a little bit of my mother coming through, who told me I would never be very good at anything. She took all my confidence away,” she explained. “I’d get days when I was depressed, which I don’t get anymore. But I would get days when I would think I was an appalling wife and an appalling person, an appalling actor. So, I may well have said that on a day when I was depressed. I can tell you now I was a great fucking wife.”

THE POWER OF MUSIC
Brenda feels that the root of her suicidal tendencies can be traced back to how she endured extreme acts of violence at the hands of her mother. Does she feel lucky to be alive?

“No, I don’t feel lucky to be alive,” she said. “I’m not that keen on life – I don’t mean that in any depressed way at all. I’m not depressed. But I’m not a high-energy person. I enjoy the very small things in life and I toddle from day to day; some are great and some are not so great. I don’t want to live to be 100.”

Brenda didn’t believe in going down the route of either therapy or taking anti-depressants.

“I can honestly say, looking back on it with 20/20 vision and hindsight, I’ve lost a lot of faith in psychiatrists,” she stated. “I think that there’s no doctor or psychiatrist that is going to advertise a cure that works because they really want to make money out of you. To go and see them once a week for the rest of your life paying €200 or something – it’s an awful lot of money.

“And you’re put on all kinds of drugs. If you look up the internet on some of these drugs they put you on – Jesus, Mary and Joseph! – it would frighten the life out of you.”

Is there less of a taboo surrounding mental illness now?

“Well, it’s getting better. When I was in Meath, in my teens, for example, or even a bit earlier – there was absolutely nothing or nobody. There was just mad houses, as they were called. People were locked up when they weren’t well. But I think there’s a huge movement forward on that because people have come out and talked about it.”

Thankfully, she no longer feels threatened by the darkness.

“I don’t suffer from depression any more,” she said. “I did for 50 years and then — having tried every combination of medication and having spent enough on psychiatrists to buy three houses on Leeson Street — I found a wonderful cure, if you like that word.”

About four years ago, she discovered the power of classical music at a therapy clinic in Dublin. “I found this guy who has a treatment he does with Mozart music. It’s quite amazing,” she explained. “It takes three months — you listen to Mozart for two hours every morning for a week, then you have a break of about a month. Then, you go back and you listen to Mozart again every morning for two hours for about a week or ten days. You lie down during it and go to sleep after that. And then you have three weeks off, or something, and you go back and you wake up cured.

“When you go in first they have a think to see whether it would work on you or not. If they think it will, then the therapist is in another room, controlling what music is being played. You don’t have to listen to a Mozart concert – but we know that certain parts of his music playing in the background has helped children to learn to read.

“I went in not expecting anything and at the end of three months I walked out and it was gone. I’ve sent about five people to them and they’ve all been cured. These were people standing on the bridge waiting to jump, you know? And they’re all laughing now.

“It is an extraordinary thing to go through. Fifty years of your life battling with this devil every day and suddenly it’s gone. In the old days you would call it a miracle. You see the world with clear eyes for the first time; you can walk down the street without being terrified; you can think clearly. It’s wonderful.”

REGRETS, I HAVE A FEW
Does she have any regrets? “In my career, I don’t have any regrets. In my life? I lived in England for nearly 25 or 30 years. I’m not sure it was the best idea to move back to Ireland. I left a lot of very good friends in London and it’s more lonely here than it would’ve been in London. I was hardly home when they all died.”

Is she religious?

“Oh Christ! Do I believe in God? Some days I might believe in God for about a minute and then I can go for a year without believing in him. I think I’m agnostic. I genuinely don’t know.”

Does she believe in an afterlife?

“I don’t know. I don’t believe in going up into the clouds, into heaven. I think it’s much more complex and scientific than that.”

In a recent Hot Press interview, Minister John Halligan told me of plans to table a bill in the Dáil on the contentious issue of euthanasia. He will have a vocal supporter in Brenda. Assisted suicide is a subject close to her heart. Terminally ill or even technically healthy, she told me she wouldn’t hesitate to check into Dignitas in Switzerland if she ever decides she wants to end her life.

”I believe even if you aren’t sick, if you feel you’ve had enough of life, that you want to go, you should be allowed to. But I don’t think that will happen here in my lifetime,” she concluded. “We should all have the right to die whenever we want to. What else do you own? Nothing. You don’t own anything at all, except your life.”