Academy Award winner Brenda Fricker has died. She was 81.
“We will never see her again and the world is lesser for the lack of her,” Fricker’s agent, Phil Belfield, told the BBC in a Friday, July 17, statement. “I was honored 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.”
Belfield also told Hello! that Fricker died after “a period of ill health.” A cause of death has not been publicly revealed.
The acclaimed actress previously opened up about her health struggles just one year before her death.
“I’m out of breath just talking,” Fricker told The Guardian in a September 2025 interview. “I’ve never known tiredness ever in my life. Weary. Will I ever get up again? I’m having a dreadful death. I’m just dying, every day in pain.”
The outlet reported that Fricker had been confined to bed rest, which inspired her to share a succinct life lesson.
“Do everything while you’re young,” she stated. “Just do it.”
Fricker, who won an Oscar in 1990 for her role in My Left Foot, also notably starred as nurse Megan Roach in BBC’s Casualty and as the “pigeon lady” in 1992’s Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.
Recalling her experience to The Guardian, Fricker ended each day of filming “covered in pigeon s***,” which is how she met fellow Home Alone 2 star Donald Trump. (The current U.S. president, 80, made a cameo as himself in the sequel film.)
“It was like I’d jumped into a pigsty but he was very polite about it,” Fricker quipped. “He just said, ‘How’s it going?’”
Fricker also had fond memories of Daniel Day-Lewis, who played her son in My Left Foot.
“I’m fond of him. A good man, great morals. But he’s a f***ing method actor. I mean, we all have a method,” she recalled of Day-Lewis, 69, last year. “I don’t mind another method actor but if they interfere with my little method, then fuck off, like, you know? I’ll be getting a phone call from Daniel. He phones me on occasion, tells me I’m being bold.”
As for her personal life, Fricker was married to late TV director Barry Davis for 15 years before their 1988 divorce.
“He was a wonderful, interesting, lovely man,” Fricker noted in an Irish radio interview in 2015. “We kept seeing each other, we were madly in love. On the day we got divorced, we held hands and went off to the movies, it was ridiculous.”
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