Home Alone 2 Actress Brenda Fricker Dies at 81

DUBLIN, IRELAND — Brenda Fricker, the Academy Award-winning Irish actress known for her performance in My Left Foot and her role in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, has died. She was 81.

Fricker died Thursday night in Dublin after a period of ill health, her agent, Phil Belfield, said in a statement.

Fricker became the first Irish woman to win an Academy Award in 1990, earning the Oscar for best supporting actress for her portrayal of Bridget Fagan Brown, the determined mother of Christy Brown in the 1989 film My Left Foot. 

She was widely recognized for playing the Pigeon Lady in the 1992 film Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, in which her character befriends Macaulay Culkin's Kevin McCallister in New York's Central Park.

"We will never see her like again and the world is lesser for the lack of her," Belfield said. "I was honored to know, love and work with her and she will always have a place in my heart and in the heart of so many film and TV fans the world over."

Over a career spanning six decades, Fricker appeared in more than 90 film and television productions between 1964 and 2024. 

Her credits also included the original cast of the BBC medical drama Casualty and a role alongside Cate Blanchett in Veronica Guerin, the film based on the life of the Irish investigative journalist who was murdered in 1996.

Born in Dublin in 1945, Fricker received the Freedom of the City, Dublin's highest civic honor, earlier this year.

In her 2025 autobiography, She Died Young: A Life in Fragments, Fricker wrote about her childhood, as well as her experiences surviving sexual violence and living with mental health challenges that led to multiple periods of institutionalization. The book, published in September 2025, became a bestseller on the Irish Sunday Times list.

Ireland's Prime Minister Micheál Martin paid tribute to Fricker on Friday.

"She was an iconic figure in Irish film and theatre, an Oscar winner and an actor of world renown," Martin wrote on X. "My thoughts are with her family and friends."