Home Alone Star Brenda Fricker Dead at 81
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.”
