This frumpy, maternal, Irish character actress gained experience in Irish theatre and with the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Court Theatre Company in Great Britain. Brenda Fricker received great acclaim for her Oscar-winning supporting performance as the determined mother of a son afflicted with cerebral palsy in "My Left Foot" (1989). Venturing to Hollywood in the 1990s, she played a homeless woman befriended by kid-on-the-loose Macaulay Culkin in the sequel "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York" (1992) and followed up with a more zany mother role in the little-seen "So I