The Real Mrs. Brown: The Authorised Biography of Brendan O'Carroll (20 page)

‘Anyway, there it was and I rang up this bloke, and when he came on the line he could hardly speak. He told me the reason later. It turned out that at the moment I’d called, he’d been tidying out his desk, found my letter and had just crumpled it up and thrown it in the bin.

‘During our conversation, he fished it back out and was smoothing it out as we spoke.’

It was one of those magical moments.

‘And I said, “Michael, what are you working on at the moment?”

‘“Well, I’m driving a van actually. I’ve been working in kids’ educational theatre but the contract has just come to an end.”

‘“Well, how would you like to come up to Glasgow?”

‘“It sounds great. But could you give me twenty-four hours to think it over?”

‘“I can give you twenty-two. Because that’s when we’re leaving.”

‘“Okay, I’ll call you before then.”

‘And he did. Eleven hours later he rang. “I’d love to come up for the audition, Brendan.”

‘“You don’t have to audition, Michael. If you want the part it’s yours.”’

Incredible. Hired on the strength of a letter and phone call. But Brendan had liked Pikey, from the tone of the letter and the conversation. (Pikey would become a Mrs Brown regular on stage and on TV, playing Cathy’s boyfriend Professor Clowne.)

In Glasgow, the cast assembled on the Monday for a week of rehearsals and Brendan replaced Paul Lee with Michael Pyatt.

In 1996, the show toured Ireland and then moved on to play in London, Manchester and Birmingham. Sales weren’t great, but it was a new play. However, when the cast arrived in Liverpool, it was now the height of summer and ‘gorgeous weather’. And the last place anyone would wish to be in was a theatre.

As a result, box office for an unknown Irish play full of unknown actors was dreadful. One night there were hardly enough people in the hall to fill the front row of the Royal Court.

Brendan was determined that it wouldn’t affect the show, saying to his cast, ‘Look, there may not be many people out there, but I want you to perform this play to the very best of your ability for every last one of them. They’ve paid their money, so they deserve to have a great night. And that’s what we’ll give them.’

But the box office was so bad that Brendan and Gerry couldn’t afford to pay the wages. It was Jenny who offered to bail them out. She borrowed £8,000 from the bank and the travelling band of actors remained in business.

That didn’t stop Brendan and his team from setting off for Toronto in August in a bid to conquer North America. Sure, the UK trip hadn’t gone too well. But they believed Canadian audiences would find
The Course
funny, given the Irish contingent who’d emigrated to North America.

And it all looked hugely promising. The troupe arrived at Toronto’s Pearson Airport, at the start of the Toronto Film Festival. Ordinarily, that would make no difference, but this year Roddy Doyle’s
The Van
was the major film being premiered.

The papers had picked up on the fact that Brendan had been nominated for a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ gong for his part and journalists’ requests for interviews flooded in. Since Brendan was the only actor from the movie who happened to be in town, it was all a godsend for the Toronto papers, a city that carries three major dailies.

Brendan couldn’t believe his luck. And he felt he had to capitalise on it.

‘We were booked to play in a small, six-hundred-seater theatre, but we reckoned that with the publicity we’d get, we had to move to a larger theatre. And we did, hiring the St Lawrence Theatre in the financial district, with two and a half thousand seats.’

The gambler was throwing the dice again. But there was a worrying sign that Brendan and Gerry’s relationship was becoming strained. Gerry had suggested everyone take an extra suitcase with them on the trip, with everyone carrying their own wardrobe. And so the actors, including Brendan, arrived at Toronto Airport and picked up the luggage, soon laden like pack mules. Except Gerry. He leapt into a taxi upon arrival and headed straight to the hotel bar. Brendan was incensed when he realised what had happened.

‘I phoned his room and got him and yelled, “I’m coming up.” And I did, and when he opened the door I chased him around the room, throwing a television set at him in the process.’

It turned out that Gerry wasn’t as badly damaged as the smashed TV set. But the incident highlighted the fact that the comedy partners weren’t entirely on the same page.

Then major disaster struck. At the last minute,
The Van
was withdrawn from the Film Festival.

‘It seemed Roddy Doyle and the director Stephen Frears couldn’t agree on the final cut. As a result, the film was pulled.’

And with it went the miles of column inches that the interviews with Brendan would have produced. The tickets for
The Course
simply didn’t sell. The first night was papered, which means tickets are given away free, in the hope word-of-mouth will encourage sales. But the second night saw only fifteen people in the audience. There were more in the cast and crew than punters in seats. More importantly, Brendan had fourteen people in hotels with no guarantee of their wages.

It didn’t matter if reviews were good, Toronto just didn’t turn out. Perhaps it was that the culture of the play was too un-Canadian. Brendan and Gerry lost £60,000 on the trip, and the Irish tour hadn’t been successful either. The reasons? Hubris. Ego. And simple economics. It was all very well taking a troupe of friends around Ireland, but they had to be paid.
The Course
worked in Dublin without hotel bills to pay, transport and food costs, etc. Outside of the city, it simply wasn’t viable.

However, there was another problem. The lack of cash had put a major strain on the Brendan–Gerry relationship. If their company balance sheet were a movie script, it would have been a horror, classified ‘X’ certificate.

By now, the pair were barely speaking. The blood brothers had developed anaemia.

Deal Or No Deal

BACK in Dublin, Brendan’s relationship with Gerry Browne improved, although it wasn’t quite what it had been before they had taken
The Course
to Toronto. Brendan had become closer to Jenny Gibney, though. It seemed she had now become much less of a gobshite in his eyes and more of a friend and a confidante. Their time on the road together had taught them that they had more in common than they’d first thought.

Meanwhile, the third in the trilogy of Agnes Browne books was released.
The Granny
went straight to Number One in the Irish bestseller list and the first print-run sold out immediately.

It was darker than the first two. With all the Browne children now grown up and leaving home to go their own ways, Agnes Browne becomes a granny at 47 when Mark and Betty have their first child. Some of the children have gone on to lead very successful lives, but Cathy is stuck in a bad marriage, and Dermot ends up in prison for manslaughter along with his best mate, Buster. Agnes finds the break-up of the family hard to deal with, but with her lover Pierre by her side, she copes.

Brendan’s writing was believable because he had drawn from his own childhood. And the work was described by the
Sunday Independent
as ‘a brilliant book’ and by the
Irish World
as having ‘language as rich as oxtail soup’.

The sales would help to make a little dent in Brendan and Gerry’s personal overdraft, but Brendan knew the books should be more successful. He didn’t feel his
Mammy
adventures were being promoted in the way they deserved. It was all very well doing great box office in Ireland, but he wanted to conquer the world. And he saw a chance to push Agnes Browne into the international spotlight one afternoon in a Dublin restaurant while having coffee with film director and producer Jim Sheridan (director of the 1989 Oscar-winning film
My Left Foot
, starring Daniel Day Lewis).

The pair had become friendly in recent months and were joined by literary agent, Darley Anderson.

‘We got talking to Darley, who had managed to secure a book deal and film rights for Jim’s brother, Peter, who was writing his first book. Jim pointed out I’d done three books but sales were contained in Ireland. Anyway, Darley asked me about the foreign rights and I told him nothing was happening on that front. He was astounded and said he wanted to become involved.

‘Later that day, Darley rang Michael O’Brien, who then called me and told me the “great news”.

‘“Darley Anderson’s been on to me, Brendan.”

‘“I know. I’ve been talking to him.”

‘“We really need to push sales abroad.”

‘Now, I’m thinking, “It’s about time, Michael!”’

The result of the meeting with Darley meant that Brendan’s work was showcased at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Some weeks passed and the plan to promote
The Mammy
and her two offspring paid off.

‘The result of going to Frankfurt was that it caught the eye of Penguin in America. And they wanted to release the three Mrs Browne books in America under a licensing agreement with O’Brien. Fantastic.’

Brendan went on a promotional tour of America, covering 22 cities in 30 days. And his books sold in their thousands. After that, he returned to his screenplay about boxing,
Sparrow’s Trap
. His Dublin publisher, Michael O’Brien wanted another O’Carroll book, and when he read the film script of
Sparrow’s Trap
he was convinced the story could be rewritten as a terrific novel. Brendan protested, rather incredibly given his success, that he wasn’t a prolific writer, certainly not someone who could turn a screenplay format into novel form. And it wasn’t a case of false modesty.

‘I’m not a writer in a structured sense. I just sit down and have a go when the mood, or the idea, takes me. But in the end I agreed to try, to keep Michael happy. Yet it was such hard work.’

He slugged it out with
Sparrow’s Trap
and won with a knockout. The book would become an Irish bestseller. And, out of the blue, during the writing process, Brendan found himself volunteering to step back into the boxing ring.

Jim Sheridan, coincidentally, was working on a boxing script for a movie, based on the life of Irish World Champion flyweight Barry McGuigan. And he wanted to make sure that there was no overlap. So the writer/director tentatively asked Brendan if he might be able to look at his script. When Brendan readily agreed, Jim Sheridan was surprised.

‘People don’t let you read their scripts normally,’ he said. ‘For all you know, I could steal some of your ideas.’

‘Well, if you did I’d just write some more.’

What confidence.

When Brendan read the McGuigan story, he loved it. But not just because of Sheridan’s clever structure and storytelling skills. He was struck by a thought. ‘This is me. I’m the guy in this story.’

He had a point. Brendan had boxed as a teenager. He even looked like Barry McGuigan.

Then Brendan had a call from Jim Sheridan, who asked him to come up to Dublin as he was keen to talk to him. It all made sense. Brendan knew, instinctively, that Jim wanted him to play the Barry McGuigan role.

So they met back in Dublin and Brendan went up to Jim Sheridan’s house. However, Brendan walked in to a surprise. Daniel Day Lewis was there. Rather taken aback, Brendan said to Jim Sheridan, in the nicest possible way, ‘What the feck’s he doing here?’

Jim Sheridan’s reply threw Brendan onto the ropes. ‘He’s playing the lead in the Barry movie.’

‘You must be joking!’

‘I was stunned. There are only two boxing weights that translate into movie terms, that’s stories about heavyweights and lightweights. This was a great lightweight story.

‘I desperately wanted to play this part. And this was one of those great roles. So I said to Jim, “Look, you can’t cast Daniel. I’m perfect to play this part. I even look like McGuigan. And I can box.”

‘“Yeh, well, I’ve done some boxing in my time too,” said Daniel.

‘I turned to Daniel and said, “Listen, Daniel. I’ll tell you how we’ll decide who’s the best man for the part. We’ll go down to Foley’s gym and get in the ring and we’ll put on the gloves and go at it for three rounds. The winner gets to play Barry McGuigan.”

‘At this point Daniel looked stunned, turned to Jim Sheridan and said, “I’m not fighting him!”

‘Now, I know I would have knocked the shite out of him – and he knew it too. He wouldn’t fight me. But he still got the role in
The Boxer
!’

Meantime, Brendan wanted some answers.

‘“Look, Jim. If you didn’t want me to play the lead in this movie, why did you call me over here?”

‘“Endings, Brendan. I can tell from your books you write great endings. I wanted you to write the ending for my movie.”

‘So I took the positive from the experience. Jim Sheridan needed me to finish his picture. He needed me. That was a great compliment.’

Jim Sheridan’s comment about Brendan coming up with great endings would prove to be ironic. Later on, the pair would argue over one of Brendan’s film endings – to the point, says Brendan, of coming close to blows.