LONDON (AP) — Brenda Fricker, who became the first Irish woman to win an Academy Award for her role as Bridget Fagan Brown in the 1989 film “My Left Foot,’’ has died. She was 81.
The Irish character actor died Thursday night in Dublin after a period of ill health, her agent, Phil Belfield said in a statement.
Fricker won the Academy Award in 1990 for best supporting actress for her portrayal of the determined mother of Christy Brown, a writer and painter who was born with cerebral palsy and could control only his left foot. Daniel Day-Lewis, who played Brown, won the award for best actor.
“She was just an amazing actress, amazing character, forceful personality, great writer,” the movie's director, Jim Sheridan, told Irish national broadcaster RTE. “She could be obsessive — in everything she did — life, work, love. But no real malice or anything, she was just a very strong personality and a good laugh.”
Fricker said she was stunned when she won the Oscar, never thinking it was possible. In her acceptance speech, she thanked Brown “just for being alive” and paid tribute to his mother, saying “anybody who gives birth 22 times deserves one of these."
She later spoke of how the award doomed her to being typecast to forever playing roles as mothers. Later in life, she said she used the weighty statuette to prop open her bathroom door.
Fricker, who appeared in more than 90 films and television shows between 1964 and 2024, was known for her role as the “pigeon lady” in the 1992 film “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York,” where she played a homeless woman who befriended Macaulay Culkin’s character in New York’s Central Park.
She also featured in the original cast of the BBC medical drama “Casualty” and appeared alongside Cate Blanchett in “Veronica Guerin,” the story of an Irish investigative journalist who was murdered in 1996.
“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.”
Born in Dublin in 1945, Fricker received the city’s highest honor earlier this year when she was awarded the Freedom of the City.
In her autobiography “She Died Young: A Life in Fragments,” Fricker describes both happy childhood escapades with her sister Grania and her struggles to overcome sexual violence and mental health issues, which caused her to be institutionalized several times. Published in September 2025, the book appeared on the Irish Sunday Times bestseller list.
Simon Harris, Ireland’s deputy prime minister, said the country had lost a national treasure.
“She truly was among the greatest exports this country has ever produced and an ambassador for Irish talent on the world stage,'' he said. "Quite simply, we will never see the like of her ever again.
Fricker was married to director Barry Davies from 1979 until they divorced in 1988. She became pregnant several times but suffered miscarriages, which led to severe depression much of her life.
Associated Press writer Brian Melley in London contributed to this report.
FILE - "My Left Foot" stars Brenda Fricker, winner of Oscar for best supporting actress, and Daniel Day Lewis, winner of Oscar for best actor, at the 62nd Annual Academy Awards in Los Angeles, March 26, 1990. (AP Photo/Bob Galbraith, File)
EASTERN UKRAINE (AP) — The commander leading Ukraine’s drone war says his country’s recent strikes in Crimea are the first phase of a campaign aimed at rendering the peninsula — illegally annexed by Russia in 2014 — unusable as a staging ground for Russian forces.
Maj. Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, one of Ukraine’s most prominent commanders among a new generation of soldiers, said his forces could strike seven times more military targets in Crimea if the money pledged by Western allies came faster.
“Crimea falls within the key conceptual pillars on the path to ending the war,” Brovdi told The Associated Press in an interview.
Despite that shortfall, Ukraine’s summer campaign in Crimea has already inflicted significant damage: striking rail bridges, oil depots and power infrastructure to disrupt supply lines and blind Russian air defenses as drones fly in.
Brovdi said his forces are equipped at just 14% of what they would need to carry out the Crimea campaign at full capacity.
A firm believer in numbers since his past life running an international grain trading business, Brovdi joined Ukraine’s territorial defense as a volunteer in the war’s opening days. He rose quickly, commanding one of the country’s most effective drone brigades before being tapped to lead a force with no precedent before this war — Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces.
“It’s not that the production capacity of Ukrainian manufacturers doesn’t allow us to make the necessary quantities” of drones, Brovdi said. “It’s the banal problem of untimely financing, which our partners do allocate, but which moves significantly slower than our plans.”
A devoted patron of the arts, Brovdi's underground command post resembles a museum, with pieces of Ukrainian art on display, including by renowned painter Maria Prymachenko — each with small placards noting their titles and a QR code linking to more information. “Please don’t touch the sculpture,” reads a sign beneath one piece.
The artwork sits against a backdrop of dozens of screens streaming live footage from the front, along with real-time data that drives decisions on the battlefield. Soldiers can grab good coffee, pick a book, work out or rest in sleeping pods — a culture that feels closer to a Silicon Valley office than a war room.
They work around the clock to try to prevent Crimea from functioning as a staging ground for the Russian military, said Brovdi, whose call sign, Magyar, nods to his ethnic Hungarian roots in Zakarpattia, the western Ukrainian region bordering Hungary.
He pointed to one sign of progress — in four recent large-scale Russian missile barrages from the peninsula, only five missiles were launched in total, a drop he credited to the systematic destruction of Russian air defenses there. The AP couldn’t independently verify the claim.
To open that “window” for drones to strike the peninsula without being shot down en masse, his forces destroyed more than 300 air defense assets over recent months — surface-to-air systems, radar stations, electronic warfare equipment.
The window metaphor sends him into a sidetrack about something personal — he loves sleeping with one open, a pleasure he rarely gets anymore as one of Russia’s most hunted men, who spends most of his time in underground bunkers.
Much of Russia's Soviet-era air defense hardware runs on the power grid, which is one of the reasons Crimea's electrical infrastructure has become a recurring target. Russian soldiers become “blind,” left with just machine guns and rifles, he said. The tactic has also impacted access to power for civilians, and Brovdi said he has twice publicly apologized to Ukrainians living in Crimea for the disruptions.
Wherever Starlink connectivity reaches across Crimea, his forces can now destroy even the most heavily defended target using an average of just three drones, mixing munitions with different characteristics and warheads depending on what’s being hit. He described the strikes as deliberately calibrated — different munitions for a bridge pier than for a fuel truck or a moving train — and said his forces avoid hitting civilian infrastructure.
“Creating conditions that make it impossible for any kind of military capability … to remain there will make Crimea uninteresting ... as a military staging ground,” he said.
Ukraine is also working to dismantle Crimea’s role as a naval base — a blow to Russia’s presence near NATO’s borders, he added.
The campaign’s early results have not been made public, Brovdi said. But roughly two weeks into the offensive that began in late June, he said Ukrainian intelligence indicated Russian authorities had ordered all military commands and security services to relocate off the peninsula, along with a covert order to remove secret archives and artworks. The AP could not independently verify the account.
Meanwhile, Russia is working to counter Ukraine’s edge. It is installing jamming systems at a scale that will, to some degree, degrade Starlink connectivity, Brovdi said.
Russia is also building its own satellite communications system to rival Starlink, he said. “This is a risk for the entire planet,” Brovdi said, “because a dictatorship will gain access to information across the whole globe.”
He also pointed to other threats facing Ukraine. The concentration of jet-powered Shahed drones, which are much harder for Ukraine to shoot down, has increased two and a half times in recent weeks, he said.
Russia's military can currently fire a simultaneous salvo of 77 ballistic missiles, he said, and plans to increase that to 200. That is one of Ukraine’s most vulnerable points, since the country is running short of interceptors for the U.S.-made Patriot — the only system Ukraine has in its arsenal against ballistic missiles — meaning dozens fired by Russia during mass barrages get through and hit their targets.
“Even if they only manage half of that, it will all be flying at us,” Brovdi said. The only way to bring the number down, he said, is by striking every facility involved in producing those missiles — underscoring the importance of Ukraine’s long-range strikes deep inside Russian territory.
Ukraine has increasingly targeted Wildberries, Russia’s largest online marketplace sometimes described as the country’s answer to Amazon, and Brovdi named it as a target.
“Wildberries is, first of all, a supply platform — it’s the war’s quartermaster,” he said, noting the company runs a dedicated section selling goods for Russia’s military.
At the same time, he said, the strikes on the retail chain are meant to make ordinary Russians feel the war directly, in hopes the resulting desire to end it could weigh on Russia’s ability to keep fighting.
Brovdi declined to give a timeline for the Wildberries campaign, saying only that the strikes will continue “until it becomes impossible for it to recover quickly.”
“Ultimately, Wildberries is, forgive the expression, a consumer gambling addiction,” he said, arguing that losing access to it — like restrictions on social media — creates an intrusion on one's personal life that most Russians feel.
“It turned out to be a sensitive sensor of the comfort of Russia’s massive population — people who consider themselves completely untouched by the actions of the aggressor country," he said.
AP reporters Vasilisa Stepanenko in eastern Ukraine and Volodymyr Yurchuk in Kyiv contributed.
A Ukrainian "Chaklun" long-range strike drone takes off from a mobile launcher during an operational launch targeting Russian military installations in Crimea, from an undisclosed location in Ukraine on Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Dan Bashakov)
A Ukrainian serviceman prepares a "Chaklun" strike drone used for deep-strike operations against Russian positions in Crimea, in an undisclosed location in Ukraine on Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Dan Bashakov)
Maj. Robert "Magyar" Brovdi speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in an undisclosed location in Ukraine on Friday, Aug. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Dan Bashakov)
Ukrainian servicemen prepare a "Chaklun" strike drone used for deep-strike operations against Russian positions in Crimea, in an undisclosed location in Ukraine on Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Dan Bashakov)
Maj. Robert "Magyar" Brovdi stands in the control room during a long-range unmanned aerial vehicle operation targeting Russian positions in an undisclosed location in Ukraine on Friday, Aug. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Dan Bashakov)
