Fricker at home on the big screen again at Dublin Film Festival

BRENDA Fricker first heard she’d been shortlisted for an Oscar in 1989 for her role as Mrs Brown in My Left Foot when a friend phoned over a crackling line from the United States.

Fricker was tending to her ailing father at the time, and had to cut her short. She said she’d call back. She went into her father’s room and mentioned to him that her friend had phoned about something to do with an Oscar Wilde play or some such frippery.

A couple of months later, Fricker was bounding onto the stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles to receive her Academy Award from Kevin Kline, having seen off shortlisted actresses such as Julia Roberts and Angelica Huston. She doesn’t remember much about the night.

“I remember flying back on the plane in first class, still a little drunk. Bob Geldof or some famous person like that was on it as well. I remember going into the cockpit and the pilot said to me, ‘I’ll let you fly the plane if you let me hold the Oscar.’ I said, ‘Of course.’ I was delighted. I’m sure I thought I was driving the plane, but it was probably on autopilot, while he paraded around the aisles with the Oscar. It was just a mad flight.”

Fricker is co-starring opposite James Fox in A Long Way From Home, as part of this year’s Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. The pair play an English couple who have been married for 50 years. They wash up in southern France for their retirement and to see out their listless, loveless final years. Fox’s character is smitten by a young holidaying woman, and he senses a door being opened by her prig of a boyfriend. Fricker’s character — named Brenda, curiously — intercedes in one particular jaw-dropping scene.

Fricker is enthused about the script, which was written by Virginia Gilbert, who also directed the movie. Fricker also appreciated Gilbert’s ability to give the film’s actors room to flex their muscles, a trait she admires in directors, and she’s worked with some notable ones, including Jim Sheridan, Joel Schumacher and Richard Attenborough.

“I have to be careful in answering this, but I don’t think I’ve ever learnt anything from a director,” she says. “I think I’ve been guided, that would be a better word to describe the way they’ve directed me to go in a certain direction. The best directors leave you alone. If they’ve cast you in the part, hopefully they believe you have the gumption to interpret the part, that you can act, that you know where the camera is, and that you can hit your marks.

“With Virginia on A Long Way From Home, she was directing for the first time. She had full knowledge of what she was doing, and she was very, very good with the actors. We talked privately about what to do. She trusted that you had read the script and understood it and had the intelligence to act the part. I think that always gets good results.”

Fricker’s career in film goes back 50 years, to the day she got an un-credited part in a film adaptation of a William Somerset Maugham story, ‘Of Human Bondage’. Prominent television roles included turns in RTÉ’s Sixties soap, Tolka Row, and a five-year stint as a nurse on the BBC’s Casualty. She’s played a lot of nurses, including a cameo on Coronation Street in 1977 as one of the nurses present during the birth of Tracy Barlow.

A large chunk of her teenage years were spent in hospital wards — two years following a cycling accident when she was thrown through the windscreen of a car and out its back window; and a year for treatment of TB. She’s bravely spoken in public about suicide attempts and her battles with the “silent, invisible” affliction of depression for much of her adult life. She recently underwent Mozart treatment to help deal with it.

“There’s a doctor who guides you,” she explains. “He’s in the next room. You spend a lot of time talking to him before you start, and he selects certain pieces of Mozart, which he then puts together. It’s like making a cocktail of medicines for you in a way. You go along then and listen to what he has picked for you. It didn’t completely get rid of my depression, but it certainly helped. It would be something I’d recommend anybody to do.”

Fricker has recently played widely acclaimed roles in the films Cloudburst and Albert Nobbs. One of her most famous scenes is the silent dinner table she shares with Richard Harris, her on-screen husband, in The Field. She says a lot of potatoes were eaten during the shoot. She has fond memories of Harris.

“He was a superb human being, with a huge moral conscience. One of the few good men I’ve met. I was very sad when he died. He was always full of mischief. He used to be up and down the hotel with sheets over his head pretending he was a ghost. He was a scream.”

Fricker says that John Kavanagh was another “joker”. During the dancing scene they shared in the 1982 TV adaptation of William Trevor’s story, ‘Ballroom of Romance’, she mentions that he was chewing garlic. It helped with the repulsion her character feels towards him. The moody, evocative film still resonates with people today, and is one she’s proud of.

“I think it was one of the best films to come out of Ireland. It was made for the BBC’s Play for Today drama slot, which is gone now. The rights were never given out for it to be distributed in the cinema so it was only seen at private viewings or occasionally on television.

“But the few times that it was seen, it was quite amazing. You’d be walking down the street and a taxi man might shout at you: ‘Are you coming into the field, Bridie?’.”

A Long Way From Home is at 7.30pm, Saturday, Feb 15 at the Savoy, 17 Upper O’Connell St, Dublin 1.