Oscar winning actor Brenda Fricker is to be awarded the Freedom of the City of Dublin following the agreement of Dublin city councillors on Monday.
The Dublin born actor has appeared in dozens of film and television roles in a career spanning six decades. In 1990, she became the first, and to date remains the only, Irish woman to win an acting Oscar, taking the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for My Left Foot the 1989 biopic of artist Christy Brown.
She has also starred in The Field, alongside Richard Harris and had roles in several high profile Hollywood productions such as Home Alone 2, A Time to Kill, and So I Married an Axe Murderer. For many she will be best known for her long-running stint as nurse Megan Roach in British TV medical drama Casualty.
Last year she published her memoir, She Died Young: A Life in Fragments.
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Nominating Fricker, Lord Mayor Ray McAdam said she was “one of Dublin’s most distinguished cultural figures and it is a source of immense pride that our city is recognising her in this way”.
The theme of his mayoralty was celebrating Dublin, he said “and tonight we do exactly that by honouring a great Dublin woman whose talent, integrity and craft have represented our capital city with distinction across a lifetime of extraordinary work”.
Fricker will become the 89th recipient of the Freedom of the City since it was first awarded in 1876 to nationalist leader Isaac Butt. Previous recipients include US presidents Ulysses S Grant, John F Kennedy and Bill Clinton, and most recently Barack Obama who received the award along with his wife Michelle.
Other international leader recipients include Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Myanmar de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who was subsequently stripped of the award in 2017 because of the repression of her country’s Rohingya Muslims.
Many sporting heroes have also received the award including Jack Charlton, Ronnie Delany, Jim Gavin and Kellie Harrington.
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