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An actress who was welcomed into millions of homes each and every holiday season has died.
Brenda Fricker, the Academy Award-winning Irish actress who appeared as the Central Park pigeon lady in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York alongside Macaulay Culkin, died July 16, her agent confirmed to E! News. She was 81.
“It is with much sadness that I share the news that beloved actress Brenda Fricker passed away peacefully last night in Dublin,” her agent said in a statement, noting Fricker’s passing came “after a period of ill health.”
Fricker—who became the first Irish woman to ever win an Oscar for her 1989 performance as Mrs. Brown in the Christy Brown biopic My Left Foot—had recently published her memoir She Died Young last year, receiving the Freedom of the City of Dublin honor, which her agent noted she was “particularly thrilled and proud of.”
“It was murder for me,” Fricker told The Guardian of writing her memoir—which details her troubling Hollywood and her grappling with being sexually assaulted as a teenager. “It was kind of ironic because I was talking about things I had paid a fortune to psychiatrists to make me forget. So it was very painful bringing them back.”
She added, “I thought they were a bit morbid. I think I’m a bit morbid. I’m Irish.”
Of course, writing wasn’t her only way of receiving acclaim. Fricker made a lifelong career out of acting on stage and the screen, starting out in the National Theatre & Royal Court in London and continuing on with appearances in films like So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993)and Victoria Guerin (2003) alongside Cate Blanchett.
In her agent’s statement, her latest role in Tadhg O’Sullivan’s The Swallow (2024), in which she plays a woman grappling with aging and legacy, “shows the truth and majesty of Brenda as an actor and is a thing of beauty.”
Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
“We will never see her like again and the world is lesser for the lack of her,” Fricker’s agentcontinued. “I was honoured to know, love and work with her and she will always have a place in my heart and in the hearts of so many film and TV fans the world over.”
In her final years, Fricker was open about her health struggles, admitting in one of her last interviews she felt “out of breath just talking,” admitting, “I’m having a dreadful death.”
Nevertheless, Fricker looked back on her life and accomplishments with pride and advised that everyone lived as fully as she did.
“Do everything while you’re young,” she added. “Just do it.”
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