The Real Mrs. Brown: The Authorised Biography of Brendan O'Carroll

by Beacom, Brian

  The Cork Examiner described how ‘the partners and life-long friends would be making many young children happy.’

  But would they put a smile on the faces of grown-ups that week in February? The production was already facing a minor meltdown.

  ‘We didn’t even have a dress rehearsal, and we were so far behind with the technical rehearsals when the lights went up for that very first scene, with me in Agnes Browne’s living room, the cast saw me as her for the very first time. Jenny says from that moment, she never saw me as Brendan O’Carroll on stage, she just saw The Mammy.

  ‘I also wanted Agnes to be totally believable to the cast. This wasn’t as it had been in rehearsals, with the cast speaking lines to a bloke with a moustache. They had to be speaking to their mother.’

  And they were. Brendan’s Agnes was bang on the money. She looked like Maureen O’Carroll and she had many of her mannerisms. On top of that, Brendan had unconsciously added little bits of Gerry Browne’s mammy, too, and of Dolly Dowdall and Cecil Sheridan’s stage dames. This wasn’t a woman up there on stage, although she had the walk, the demeanour, the presence. But it wasn’t a caricature either. It was as close as you can get without removing the Adam’s Apple and the usual male instrumentation. The Monday night audience bought into Brendan’s performance completely. His stage version of the character he’d created on radio was hilarious, and the audience loved her from the moment she shuffled onto the stage.

  They also loved her friend, Winnie. What the audience didn’t realise was that Winnie was far from the doddery old lady she appeared on stage; that Eilish O’Carroll had done a fantastic job of getting into character. She had achieved it by creating a picture in her head of who Winnie should look like, based on her mammy’s friend, Nancy Pimley. Nancy was a bright Winnie, but always in awe of Maureen O’Carroll.

  And all the other characters gelled. A standing ovation followed the curtain drop and, after the show, the cast celebrated like it was Christmas and New Year combined.

  All except Brendan. He had other matters on his mind.

  ‘At this time, Fiona was sixteen and she was working on the ships to Le Havre as a receptionist. She called me in tears. She was being worked for twenty-two-hour stretches and had had enough. So I said to leave the ferry when she came back and I’d pick her up in Wexford. And I set off at four a.m. to collect her and took her for breakfast and to cheer her up, and she was grand.’

  The newspaper reviews were also grand.

  ‘The Cork Examiner review began, “I was met at the door of the theatre before the show started by the front-of-house manager, Vincent. He obviously wasn’t expecting to see me. He said, ‘Welcome to the show, but let me just forewarn you. This is not Shakespeare.’ But you know, I’ve seen this play and I have to say this is Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote for the Penny Circle. Shakespeare wrote for people who have dreary lives, who get to come and watch their lives being lit up on stage and have the opportunity to laugh at themselves. This is what Shakespeare did. And this is indeed Shakespeare.”’

  The review helped box-office sales, but word-of-mouth was the major factor. By lunchtime on Tuesday, that night’s play was sold out. And the rest of the week quickly sold out too. Brendan’s wings began to appear again.

  ‘The theatre manager asked us if we would extend the show to Saturday and Sunday. And we didn’t want to let him down – he’d shown faith in us – so we agreed. And we weren’t opening until the Tuesday in the Gaiety, so it was all feasible.’

  But there was a problem to overcome. The actress who played Betty said she didn’t want to perform at the weekend. She said she wasn’t signed up for the weekend, and she’d made plans to go out with her boyfriend.

  ‘I said, “Look love, this is the acting business. You have to work when the opportunity is there. And, even more importantly, if this play does well, and I think it might, we could extend our run. And we’re going to Dublin for three weeks. Who knows what will happen?” But she stuck her heels in. “I’m not doing Saturday and Sunday,” she argued. And I said, “Okay, no problem.”’

  Brendan came up with a ready solution. Once again he decided to pick a wild flower from the garden. In this case it was Sheila Carty, who ran the theatre bar. Brendan reckoned she had a great personality, which came across after the shows when she would get up and sing with the jazz band.

  So why not put her up there on stage?

  ‘I said to her that night, “Sheila, I want you to watch the play tonight really closely, in particular the part of Betty. Because, on Saturday, I want you to play Betty.”

  ‘She looked shocked and said, “Oh, I couldn’t, Brendan. I’ve never acted.”’

  But she could. And she did. Sheila would go on to tour with the cast as Betty for the next two years.

  The next stop was Dublin. And the play took the town by storm, going on to run at the Gaiety for an incredible 15 weeks, beating the audience records for The Course.

  Yet, Brendan says he was a little more subdued by success this time around.

  ‘I didn’t ever go back to the thinking that I owned the sun,’ he says. ‘I came off stage feeling thankful that we’d gotten away with it, that we’d had a wonderful day. And that’s the way I’ve felt ever since.’

  He adds, ‘I’m always saying to Jenny, “Hey, it’s the end of the day and we’re still alive.”’

  Now, all Brendan and Gerry had to do was take Mrs Browne on tour. But they were both entirely aware that having a hit play in your home town doesn’t guarantee success anywhere else.

  However, Brendan believed he had to take the gamble.

  Agnes Belongs to Glasgow

  THE IRISH success of Last Wedding wasn’t the only highlight of 1999. Brendan had a small part in the hit movie Angela’s Ashes, playing an undertaker, although he admits he found Frank McCourt’s book about his Limerick childhood a little depressing and didn’t make it past Chapter Ten. (Angela’s Ashes also offered work to a hopeful young actor, Danny O’Carroll. Now 16, Danny would eventually join his dad on stage playing the Buster Brady character.)

  Director Alan Parker and star Bobby Carlyle were great to work with. But Brendan found filming Angela’s Ashes traumatic.

  ‘I accepted the part immediately. But it was only when I looked at it more closely did I realise that I would be burying children in their little white coffins. Suddenly the colour drained out of my face. All I could think about was little Brendan.

  ‘After the funeral scene, Bobby asked me to come out for a pint with him and the rest of the cast, but I turned him down. After filming a scene like that, I just wanted to go home. It was so emotionally draining I couldn’t bear to go out and enjoy myself, even though in retrospect it would have probably been a great way to unwind.’

  Brendan’s next focus was on the upcoming Last Wedding tour. This time he was more than aware of the risks of taking out a huge production, with so many hotel rooms to pay for and mouths to feed. He knew he had a hit play. But would the UK give Mrs Brown the time of day?

  Gerry Browne was dispatched to Glasgow, a hugely important city in that it was home to the Pavilion Theatre, a former variety hall and a 1,600-seater with a distinctly working-class audience. On the face of it, the Pavilion was the perfect home for Agnes and co. And so Gerry arrived at the theatre door with a plastic bag in his hand and a look of desperation on his face. But, in the Superquinn bag, he felt, lay hope. What it contained was a dog-eared copy of Mrs Brown’s Last Wedding.

  But what would the no-nonsense, short-fused Pavilion manager Iain Gordon think of this Irish invasion? When the phone rang in his upstairs office to herald the arrival of a Mr Browne, Iain Gordon studied his closed-circuit camera to check out the man in the foyer. And the sight of a tall, slightly scruffy, slightly desperate-looking man clutching a supermarket plastic bag didn’t impress him.

  Upstairs in the office, Iain Gordon told Gerry Browne straight off he’d never heard of him or Brendan O’Carroll. And why should he even think about st
aging an unknown Irish play in his town?

  But he liked Gerry Browne’s upbeat attitude, and loved the fact he seemed a trier, and said he would read the script. He did – but the result wasn’t good. The theatre boss reckoned the play was ‘as funny as piles’.

  Gerry persisted, arguing how well it had gone down in Dublin. Iain Gordon listened, but didn’t agree. It was only when he brought in an actor friend to read it aloud in an Irish accent that it seemed to make sense.

  The Glasgow theatre boss agreed to take the chance on the play, splitting the box-office receipts. But there was a problem. The Pavilion manager reckoned a new play needed £25,000 spent on advertising, which Brendan and Gerry would pay half of. But Brendan and Gerry, still with massive debts, had no money. Zero. Gerry was in fact sticking the travel costs on his Visa card.

  Gerry asked Iain Gordon for an advance. It was highly unusual, but the gruff Glasgow theatre boss put his hand in his pocket and gave the Irishman the money for the hotels.

  The Pavilion boss also paid for the radio and newspaper advertising. But the strategy didn’t work. Ticket sales were disastrous.

  And when the Irish hopefuls turned up for technical rehearsals the day before the show opened in June 1999, the Pavilion boss was dismayed by what he saw. He reckons the set was the cheapest, tackiest, ever. And Brendan and co. ‘looked to be a team of losers’.

  To make matters worse, ticket sales for the week were dreadful. June is not a great month for theatres anywhere, but this was disastrous. A few hundred tickets had been sold for the opening night, but that was in a two-for-one deal.

  The entire ticket sales for the week were just £5,000 (an average production would take in from £50,000 to £80,000 for the week) and the Pavilion boss was all set to pull the production.

  ‘I wouldn’t have blamed him,’ says Brendan. ‘The advertising hadn’t worked. No one had ever heard of the Mrs Brown character. Why would they come?’

  However, Brendan made an appeal to Iain Gordon.

  ‘I walked into his office and said, ‘If you stick with this play, I will make you a million quid.’ Now, the truth is, I didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. But it turned out to be true.’

  The theatre boss announced to Brendan and Gerry that he’d run the show until the end of the week, and then it would be pulled. He was cutting his losses.

  On opening night, however, the theatre boss was amazed by what he witnessed on stage. It didn’t matter if the set looked a bit ramshackle, the audience simply loved Last Wedding. And Iain Gordon, a man who guards his emotions more carefully than the box-office takings, says he laughed louder than he’d ever laughed in his life. By the end of the week, a minor miracle on Renfield Street was taking place. Those who’d seen the first few nights had gone home and told their friends. The box-office phone sparkled like the generators Brendan, John Breen and Jimmy Matthews had once slept near. And the theatre boss kept the doors open for a second week. On one day alone, the Pavilion till took £20,000.

  ‘You have to take your hat off to Iain Gordon. He didn’t know us from Adam. He gave us the theatre with no rent and no guarantees. He showed a lot of balls.’

  This was The Course all over again, except it set a pattern of success that would continue for the next decade.

  That run at the Pavilion alone saw Mrs Brown’s Last Wedding pull in £400,000. Brendan had conquered Glasgow, which would become his favourite venue in the UK, with the Agnes Brown plays going on to pull in millions.

  (Bugsy made his first appearance on stage at the Pavilion, playing the role of Grandad, in a cameo. The former window-cleaner, now instantly recognisable, is today besieged for autographs wherever he goes.)

  Thankfully, Liverpool and Manchester followed suit. Not quite in the same numbers as Glasgow, but the Mrs Brown train, packed with friends and family, was now funded – and off and running.

  However, in London, at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, it came off the rails, in terms of the broadsheet reviews and box office.

  ‘It is potentially a fine enough comic set-up, and gets plenty of laughs,’ said the Financial Times. ‘However, the thing is, most of the laughs are titters of genteel shock that O’Carroll has taken a mildly smirksome line and inserted the word “fuckin” into it. I began to keep a tally of the number of laugh lines he gave himself which did not include that or another expletive; by the end of the show, I had spotted a grand total of five.

  ‘The audience, on the other hand, were by the end so ready to laugh at anything that they giggled through the climactic mother–daughter sentimentality.’

  The reviewer added, ‘The play exists somewhere between Roddy Doyle-land and the territory of Caroline Aherne’s The Royle Family, with a cousin of Les Dawson’s Ada in charge.’

  The review highlighted a couple of important points: the broadsheets weren’t keen on what they thought was lowbrow entertainment; yet, those in the audience loved Brendan’s broad comedy strokes.

  Sadly, Last Wedding played to houses little more than a third full in Hammersmith. Brendan and Gerry didn’t have the money to back the full-scale advertising campaign needed in London.

  Yet Brendan wasn’t overly worried.

  ‘Fuck London,’ he said at the time.

  And, after all, the northern cities loved Agnes. But sadly, overall box-office success didn’t cement the relationship between Brendan and Gerry. Gerry was dealing with his own problems. He’d had enough of travelling with the O’Carroll circus and decided it was time to step off the carousel.

  Gerry decided he would break up the partnership on the night of the premiere of Agnes Browne in Dublin in November. At the time, the former milkman had a broken ankle he’d sustained in a football match but, more importantly, a broken spirit. He had spent too many years living in a metaphorical tent and he reckoned his wife and two kids were paramount. He’d watched Brendan’s marriage break up and didn’t want his to go the same way.

  Even though Gerry was desperately broke, he chose to walk away from the upcoming plays, the Mrs Brown royalties, everything.

  What had happened between the pair to break up such an incredible friendship? Two men going at different speeds, sometimes in different directions? Perhaps.

  Or perhaps they were like many seemingly inseparable double acts such as Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Abbott and Costello, Little and Large, there simply comes a time when they have to separate.

  ‘It was on the cards, I guess. During the difficult times we would have rows and Gerry would get angry and say, “You bastard! I’ve looked after you since we were kids . . .”

  ‘And I’d yell back, “You didn’t, Gerry. We made it up!”

  ‘“Well, I would have . . .”

  ‘It had all become confused. We simply weren’t on the same page any more.’

  The pair had loved each other like brothers. Somehow, life got in the way.

  Film director Jim Sheridan landed Gerry a couple of small roles in movies, but Brendan’s former best friend was not after the limelight – he happily went from making a movie with Anjelica Huston and Tom Jones to gigging in a hotel bar for £200. However, he was content to be living a life he could control.

  Brendan believed it was time to go it alone.

  ‘What I do think was that Gerry believed his own publicity. In his own way, though, he was a lovable guy.’

  Brendan had lost his best friend. Benny and Gerry, who’d shared debts, reviews, holiday apartments with their wives (and even beds back in the touring days when they were skint), were no longer an item.

  But Brendan had greater problems to contend with.

  The Special One in Bethlehem

  THE GLASGOW success story continued on to Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow – Mrs Brown’s Last Wedding returned to the city in October 1999 and sold out. And the play went on to tour in Canada and Australia.

  But that didn’t mean Brendan was home and dry as far as the banks were concerned. He had a long way to go.

&
nbsp; Yet, at least he now had stability in his personal life. What had changed in recent times were his feelings for Jenny. She had been a semi-permanent fixture in his life since 1995 – they had been working together, sharing problems, sharing the cost of keeping a troupe together – and it was obvious, if not to themselves, but certainly to those around them, they would become a couple.

  However, when they made their announcement, there were seismic shockwaves. After all, Brendan was now a national figure.

  At the time of his marriage break-up, Brendan had called the papers in Dublin and informed them that he and Doreen had parted. He asked that they refrain from writing about the story, in a pre-emptive strike, because of how vulnerable the kids were feeling. And Brendan said he would talk about the break-up later on.

  All the papers respected the request, except for the News of the World. When the story appeared, it was given a massive six pages of coverage.

  Doreen was knocked for six. It was all very well agreeing to go on The Late, Late Show, but that was for the good of the family. This latest bout of publicity rocked her world.

  The producers of The Late, Late Show, however, deemed the break-up to be of interest to their viewers, who would want to know the reason for the end of the seemingly happy marriage.

  ‘Gay said he wanted me to come on the show, and he wanted to talk about the split “for a few minutes”. Now, I had never disagreed with anything Gay had suggested before, but I couldn’t go along with this. So I said, “Look, Gay, I’ll talk about the split, but I won’t do it in three minutes. If you want to talk about it, then that’s what the interview will be about. I’m not going to go onto a serious subject and start to play the clown. It won’t sit right.” And he protested, saying, “No, we have to mention the split. It’s been in the papers.” And I said, “Yes, but a subject like that has to be done properly. I’m not going to gloss over it.”