The Real Mrs. Brown: The Authorised Biography of Brendan O'Carroll (22 page)

(The Reddins were the family who’d lived in Gerry Browne’s house before the Brownes moved in.)

It told of how young Agnes manages to survive the indignities and demands of Catholic school, the unwanted births of siblings, days spent in the factories and markets, and nights in the dance hall as rock and roll invades Dublin.

A poignant line from the book summed up the spirit. ‘She had watched her sisters over the years, each one trying to be more beautiful than the others, constantly dressing up and appearing at social events looking like a gardener’s exhibit. The sole purpose of which seemed to be to capture a man just like their father – and then become invisible just like their mother.’

The book joined its predecessors on the bestseller list although, like the rest, it didn’t make a fortune.

‘At this point, I had a lovely office in the house in Ashbourne (replicas of a grinning Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy lined the steps), but I’d do my writing in the kitchen, between midnight and 4 a.m., with CNN on beside me with no sound. I’d sit there and look around, and it was important to have a house like that. It reminded me why I worked so hard.

‘My only indulgence, besides the house, was that I bought myself a twenty-six-thousand-pound car, a Renault Saffron. I despise drugs. I like a vodka, but not to excess. Doreen still collected the feckin’ vouchers off the milk to get free flights to England. Every now and again, I needed to have a splurge, but only very rarely and under controlled conditions. I’d say to Doreen, “Let’s go to Shelbourne Park with two hundred quid and blow it.” And when we went, we blew it. If you go to the dogs for one day, you’re gonna blow your bread. But I got great craic blowing it. Then, that’s that. It’s over.’

But Brendan was still gambling, big time, with his career. As if trying to develop
Sparrow’s Trap
, writing
The Young Wan
, touring and getting Agnes Browne to Hollywood weren’t enough, Brendan began work on another novel,
Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Mo
, an epic tale spanning several generations and incorporating themes such as racism and Church oppression.

It’s still not finished, though, because other commitments got in the way – such as a new play he’d written. His late-night kitchen table sessions had produced
Grandad’s Sure Lilly’s Still Alive.

The story involves Charlie, a recently retired deep-sea sailor, who arrives at the Kingfisher Retirement Home to be faced by a motley bunch of characters. The residents are bored and lonely until this auld fella, full of PMA, comes up with the idea of staging a play in the home – and rehearsals begin. But we discover Grandad mourns for his lost love, who happens to be a lady of the night, and he goes off searching for her.

The premise seemed fine, although it’s always tricky portraying old people. But Brendan and Gerry had a more pressing problem: they had no money to mount the production. To the world they were two successful guys who lived in lovely homes in a lovely village with lovely fitted kitchens. But, in reality, they lived day to day.

The other problem was the play, like
The Course
, had a huge cast. (Though one particular delight was that Brendan’s sister Eilish joined the team as wardrobe mistress. She’d gone on to live in England and had acted in am-dram, and was keen to come back to Ireland.)

Luckily, Brendan and Gerry pulled in a sponsor in the form of Brendan’s friend Mike Nolan, who ran an electronics company. And when things got really tight they’d do a gig.

But first, Brendan had to be able to convince as a 90-year-old.

‘I needed to be able to age up, so I rang a guy I knew in Dunleary College of Art, to ask if they had a good up-and-coming make-up artist. They had, and his name was Tom McInnerney, and he created Charlie. (Tom McInnerney would go on to work on
Star Wars
and
The Nutty Professor.
And Brendan also appeared, for the first time in drag, as a character called Maisie.)

The cast was similar to
The Course
, with Brendan using as much of his new family as possible, including Jenny, with Gerry playing Pius Lamb.

Grandad’s Sure Lilly’s Still Alive
opened at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, in June 1997, with Brendan in the lead, offering up a great rendition of a doddery auld codger, capturing both the pathos and the comedy of old age.

‘You can’t have comedy without pathos. Comedy in itself is sad. I have to be honest and say that I laugh at dark things. I see an old woman walking down the street and the arse comes out of her shopping bag and I fall around the place laughing. Now, I’ll help her pick things up, but I think it’s so funny. People walking into lampposts – hilarious!’

He also admitted to loving happy endings. ‘Steven Spielberg said you can do anything you like with an audience. You can have sharks eating people or aliens arrive from space. But give them a happy ending and you can do anything with them. This play definitely ends happily.’

Brendan’s slapstick and shamelessly sentimental play didn’t produce a happy ending for its producer, however. It certainly didn’t hit the mark
The Course
had. The play enjoyed some initial success, but the short Irish tour didn’t sell. The Irish disappointment didn’t stop Brendan and Gerry from lining up an English tour, though, a position born out of a shared madness as much as confidence. (It’s all very well staring in the direction of the sun – but be careful you don’t get sunburn.)

Looking back, Brendan agrees they should have cut their losses. He should never have taken the chance on touring an untested play with such a large cast and costs.

Yet, he couldn’t kill the production. He had tremendous faith in the play, the world he’d created. Cutting the production would have been like cutting a leg off. Brendan believed the play to be really funny. He loved the idea of older people revealing they had a real sense of fun, a theme he would later develop with Agnes Brown. As the producer and writer, he could create roles for friends such as Gerry and Jenny Gibney, and provide work for Bugsy and Eilish and the crew. Brendan had become an old-style actor/manager, who travelled with his troupe of performing players across the land.

However, he had to get better at arithmetic. By the time the troupe played Liverpool, Brendan and Gerry were once again facing financial ruin.

During one performance there were only ten people in the audience. And the cast, predictably, were so low they were almost in the orchestra pit.

The lack of cash was set to bring the curtain crashing down, but another disaster got in the way.

Gerry had made a day trip back to Ireland and on his return had been arrested after a minor altercation with an overzealous female customs officer, who’d assumed every Irishman was a troublemaking Celtic supporter in town to watch Celtic play Liverpool that night.

The case would never go to court and CCTV of the incident conveniently ‘went missing’. But Gerry was badly beaten up by four security men, suffered concussion and the play had to be cancelled.

Yet, while Brendan was losing money on his theatre productions, he was never tempted to go cap-in-hand to Ireland’s art theatre Establishment.

‘I know that if you entertain people, they will come. They won’t come if your idea of theatre is a couple of actors on a stage wanking each other off.’

Perhaps he had heard of the South American production of
The Marquis de Sade Story
which played at the Edinburgh Festival in 1998 and did indeed feature two blokes performing self-love in front of an audience.

No matter, Brendan’s Darwinist approach to theatre survival meant he was more than prepared to take his own losses on the chin. But the
Grandad
loss meant his chin was very sore indeed.

The gamble, on this occasion, didn’t pay off. What to do next? RTÉ would come up with the short-term answer, offering a new series of
Hot Milk And Pepper
.

At least that would pay the bills. But in the longer term his ambitions lay in Hollywood, where all the streets are paved with gold.

They are, aren’t they?

Who’s Agnes?

THE DISAPPOINTMENT of
Grandad
was tempered slightly when Brendan was offered the role of Rissoll in the Irish movie
The Tale of Sweety Barrett
, starring Brendan Gleeson as Sweety, a large man with a childlike innocence who is forced to leave his job in a circus and ends up in a fishing village, making and smuggling bootleg whiskey.

Then it was back to RTÉ for the next series of
Hot Milk And Pepper
.

‘I got a call from the producer who said the TV station really wanted to do a second series, but without Gerry Browne.’

There are those stars who would have left their right-hand man out in the cold and, given Brendan had had to crowbar his chum into the show in the first place, he could perhaps have been forgiven for doing so. But fortunately for Gerry Browne, Brendan O’Carroll didn’t see it that way.

‘I said, “Look, I don’t work without Gerry. That’s the way it is.”’

The waiter and the milkman were a team. Yet, Brendan felt he and Gerry weren’t always on the same wavelength.

‘I heard he was cancelling offers to do things I didn’t know about. Too much was happening and I think Gerry was panicking. It was getting out of his control.’

Brendan has a theory about why Gerry wasn’t behaving as he’d hoped.

‘People aren’t born to enjoy success. We’re programmed to hunt and then sleep. Success is an unnatural state. The problem with success is that some people can’t cope with it – and they also worry if they can hold onto it. I think Gerry saw success looming and just couldn’t take it.’

But Brendan couldn’t jettison his friend. He had been half of the partnership. He owed him. Yet, what had been an equal partnership was now unbalanced. Brendan maintains he had grown in ways that Gerry hadn’t.

‘I think he was happy when we were gigging around the country and we’d get a thousand people at the door, paying a tenner a ticket. I was having to push him all the time.’

Gerry disagrees with this theory. He argues he was incredibly happy
not
to be gigging around the country, singing comedy parodies night after night. He was all too happy to ride whichever new showbiz horse came along.

Regardless, the TV series recorded, Brendan could focus hard on the movie deal. But there was a more immediate problem to overcome: who to play Agnes?

Buena Vista Productions never considered for a moment Brendan himself could play Agnes in a film. Sure, he’d played the part wonderfully on Dublin station 2FM but, despite the fact film companies often miscast (John Wayne as Genghis Khan comes to mind, or Sean Connery as an Irish cop in
The Untouchables
), Disney reckoned film audiences wouldn’t buy into the fact that Mrs Browne could be played convincingly by a balding 44-year-old.

On the other side it could be argued that Buena Vista weren’t considering the legendary screen cross-dressing successes of the likes of Alistair Sim, Alec Guinness or Dustin Hoffman. And Agnes Browne wasn’t a comedy as such. It was a drama with comedy.

But no, they felt they needed a star to play Agnes Browne, and that’s why Brendan ended up on a plane headed for Tinseltown – to meet Anjelica Huston.

Buena Vista people in LA had suggested the role to the actress, who’d read the book – and loved it. What also heightened her interest was she’d lived in Galway as a schoolgirl, with her famous director dad, John. Anjelica, she said, felt a real affinity with the Irish.

Now, Brendan knew instinctively that the pale-faced, dark-eyed Anjelica, who’d once played Morticia in
The Addams Family
, would be perfect for the part of Agnes Browne – had Agnes been Transylvanian and lived in a Gothic castle instead of a Dublin council house. At least Huston’s Irish accent was rather more believable than that of Tom Cruise in the cinema turkey
Far And Away
. But that didn’t matter so much. What mattered was that Brendan was cash-strapped, thanks to the cost of staging
Grandad
,
and had to pay his debts. And here, after all, was one of the biggest names in the movie world agreeing to a meet.

‘I didn’t know much about her at the time. All I knew was that she’d been with Jack Nicholson for years and that she was really part of America’s royal family. But what I did know was that if she agreed to make the movie . . . well, her name alone would create massive interest. The film couldn’t fail with a Huston attached to the project.’

Meantime, director Jim Sheridan had come on board the project as co-producer, and Brendan was delighted to have a fellow Dubliner and high-profile film industry figure to help steer the film through tricky waters.

Now, all Brendan and Jim had to do was to convince the pallid actress with the intimidating presence that she should sign up with the film.

‘We drove down to Venice Beach in Los Angeles, where Anjelica owns a whole block, and her office is part of that block. The first thing she did when we met was light a cigarette and I thought, “Thank, God.” I didn’t think you would be allowed to smoke anywhere in LA.’