THE DISAPPOINTMENT of Grandad was tempered slightly when Brendan was offered the role of Rissoll in the Irish movie The Tale of Sweety Barrett, starring Brendan Gleeson as Sweety, a large man with a childlike innocence who is forced to leave his job in a circus and ends up in a fishing village, making and smuggling bootleg whiskey.
Then it was back to RTÉ for the next series of Hot Milk And Pepper.
‘I got a call from the producer who said the TV station really wanted to do a second series, but without Gerry Browne.’
There are those stars who would have left their right-hand man out in the cold and, given Brendan had had to crowbar his chum into the show in the first place, he could perhaps have been forgiven for doing so. But fortunately for Gerry Browne, Brendan O’Carroll didn’t see it that way.
‘I said, “Look, I don’t work without Gerry. That’s the way it is.”’
The waiter and the milkman were a team. Yet, Brendan felt he and Gerry weren’t always on the same wavelength.
‘I heard he was cancelling offers to do things I didn’t know about. Too much was happening and I think Gerry was panicking. It was getting out of his control.’
Brendan has a theory about why Gerry wasn’t behaving as he’d hoped.
‘People aren’t born to enjoy success. We’re programmed to hunt and then sleep. Success is an unnatural state. The problem with success is that some people can’t cope with it – and they also worry if they can hold onto it. I think Gerry saw success looming and just couldn’t take it.’
But Brendan couldn’t jettison his friend. He had been half of the partnership. He owed him. Yet, what had been an equal partnership was now unbalanced. Brendan maintains he had grown in ways that Gerry hadn’t.
‘I think he was happy when we were gigging around the country and we’d get a thousand people at the door, paying a tenner a ticket. I was having to push him all the time.’
Gerry disagrees with this theory. He argues he was incredibly happy not to be gigging around the country, singing comedy parodies night after night. He was all too happy to ride whichever new showbiz horse came along.
Regardless, the TV series recorded, Brendan could focus hard on the movie deal. But there was a more immediate problem to overcome: who to play Agnes?
Buena Vista Productions never considered for a moment Brendan himself could play Agnes in a film. Sure, he’d played the part wonderfully on Dublin station 2FM but, despite the fact film companies often miscast (John Wayne as Genghis Khan comes to mind, or Sean Connery as an Irish cop in The Untouchables), Disney reckoned film audiences wouldn’t buy into the fact that Mrs Browne could be played convincingly by a balding 44-year-old.
On the other side it could be argued that Buena Vista weren’t considering the legendary screen cross-dressing successes of the likes of Alistair Sim, Alec Guinness or Dustin Hoffman. And Agnes Browne wasn’t a comedy as such. It was a drama with comedy.
But no, they felt they needed a star to play Agnes Browne, and that’s why Brendan ended up on a plane headed for Tinseltown – to meet Anjelica Huston.
Buena Vista people in LA had suggested the role to the actress, who’d read the book – and loved it. What also heightened her interest was she’d lived in Galway as a schoolgirl, with her famous director dad, John. Anjelica, she said, felt a real affinity with the Irish.
Now, Brendan knew instinctively that the pale-faced, dark-eyed Anjelica, who’d once played Morticia in The Addams Family, would be perfect for the part of Agnes Browne – had Agnes been Transylvanian and lived in a Gothic castle instead of a Dublin council house. At least Huston’s Irish accent was rather more believable than that of Tom Cruise in the cinema turkey Far And Away. But that didn’t matter so much. What mattered was that Brendan was cash-strapped, thanks to the cost of staging Grandad, and had to pay his debts. And here, after all, was one of the biggest names in the movie world agreeing to a meet.
‘I didn’t know much about her at the time. All I knew was that she’d been with Jack Nicholson for years and that she was really part of America’s royal family. But what I did know was that if she agreed to make the movie . . . well, her name alone would create massive interest. The film couldn’t fail with a Huston attached to the project.’
Meantime, director Jim Sheridan had come on board the project as co-producer, and Brendan was delighted to have a fellow Dubliner and high-profile film industry figure to help steer the film through tricky waters.
Now, all Brendan and Jim had to do was to convince the pallid actress with the intimidating presence that she should sign up with the film.
‘We drove down to Venice Beach in Los Angeles, where Anjelica owns a whole block, and her office is part of that block. The first thing she did when we met was light a cigarette and I thought, “Thank, God.” I didn’t think you would be allowed to smoke anywhere in LA.’
Anjelica began the chat by telling the Mrs Browne creator that the Agnes Browne script was a work of genius, that the little Irishman was the funniest writer to come out of the Emerald Isle since Oscar Wilde. Or, at least, that’s what she would have said had they been living in a parallel universe.
‘She told me that the script was shit. And I just smiled. The script had been written by the hired writer, and I didn’t really think it captured the essence of the book.
‘Everything was wrong with it,’ says Brendan. ‘The pathos was gone. There was no rhythm, no flow. But I was told that it could be modified, that another draft could be done.
‘So the next night we had another meeting, and when we got out there Angelica had rung the production office. She was demanding to know what had happened to the original book she’d read.
‘John Goldsmith wrote a second draft and again her reaction was, “What the hell is this?” At this point Jim Sheridan announced to me, “We need to have a bash at this,” and then he announced to me, “You don’t know what this film is about.”
‘“I think I do.”
‘“You think you do, but you don’t.”
‘“Well, considering I wrote the book, I’ve a feckin’ fair idea what it’s all about.”
‘I was hearing this from a director who had won an Academy Award. I wasn’t talking to a nobody. But on the other hand I couldn’t understand what he was saying. It just left me thinking, “What the hell have I got myself into?”’
Brendan came back to Ireland, to tour again with Gerry, leaving Jim Sheridan to sort out the problem with the script and Anjelica Huston’s vision of how it should read.
But it didn’t look as though a happy solution could be found.
‘I came up with the idea that the only solution was for me to go back out to LA with the co-producer, Greg Smith.’
And at the start of this trip a little magic moment occurred.
‘I was doing a guest spot on the National Song Contest, filming the show in Cork, then had to get to London for a connecting flight to LA. But when I got to London, eventually, because the flight was held up with really bad fog, I got to the Aer Lingus terminal and I was handed a note. It was from Greg Smith, who was also late, and it said since we’d missed the LA flight, he suggested we should take the Virgin flight instead.
‘So I waited in the American Airlines lounge, until three p.m. when the next flight was due to leave, and I happened to have a look at Greg’s note again. It had been written on a telex, and I turned it over, and on the other side there was another printed note. It read: Miss Jennifer Gibney is arriving in Heathrow, but has been fog delayed. She will be taking a taxi from Heathrow to Gatwick and will be flying on to LA. But she has forgotten her passport, which is being flown direct from Dublin to Gatwick. Please make sure she gets her passport on arrival.’
What were the chances of Brendan being handed a note with details of Jenny’s holiday plans? And it being on the other side of his message from Greg Smith?
‘How weird is that?’
Very weird. And it transpired that Brendan’s Virgin flight was the same plane Jenny was now travelling on.
‘But I was in first class, and she was in coach, so I didn’t go back,’ he says, laughing.
‘However, we spoke in the airport. And I rang her a couple of days later, at her sister’s, and we met for a drink.’
The pair were growing closer. There was a real connection. But not an affair. However, it’s fair to say Doreen didn’t feature too often in this new world Brendan was creating for himself. And part of that creative process involved keeping Anjelica Huston happy.
‘I spoke to Anjelica on arrival and agreed with her comments about the film. Then she asked how we should go about getting the script right, and I offered this basic idea that we’d take the fifty best bits of the book and make them into a movie. She thought that made sense and we agreed the best bits. And we played out scenes, where she would be Agnes and I’d be Winnie, Agnes’s friend. And we’d swap around.
‘Every night I’d go back to the hotel and I’d work on the ideas we’d come up with that day. And the next day she’d be so impressed that I’d worked overnight. As a result of working with her every day, I was in heaven. It had to be one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life. That entire week’s work was just breathtaking.
‘However, at the end of the first day, co-producer Greg Smith came to pick me up in a limo. And as we headed back to the hotel, he asked how it was all going. And I said, “Great, Greg. But I have to tell you. I’m not getting actors’ notes off Anjelica. I’m getting director’s notes.”
‘“What do you mean?”
‘“I don’t get the feeling she wants to play Agnes. I get the feeling she wants to direct.”
‘“No, no. She’s in every page of the script, Brendan. She can’t direct and act. And we’ve got Emma Thompson down to direct.”’
As they worked together, Brendan could see Anjelica become more absorbed with the life of Agnes Browne. The book’s ending sees Agnes meet the man of her dreams, who happens to be Cliff Richard. And indeed the Peter Pan of Pop was written into the script to play a cameo. But Anjelica had a thought; she said that – rather than the original Bachelor as the dreamboat – surely Agnes Browne’s fantasy man would more likely be Tom Jones?
‘I said, “You know, you’re right. I wish I had thought of that at the time. Agnes wouldn’t be into a cuddly mummy’s boy. She’d be into a Tom Jones, a bit of a rascal.”
‘As it turns out, Disney had already asked Cliff if he would play the part, but Cliff wanted a guarantee that none of the kids would say “fuck” in the film, as they had done in the book. But Disney said, “Sorry. The dialogue stays as it is,” and Cliff turned it down. When Anjelica heard this she just picked up her phone straight off and called Tom Jones. “Tom, Hi. Want to do something with me? . . . A film . . . Great! Yeh. Maybe two weeks.” And she turned to me and said, “Tom’s in.”’
Brendan’s excitement soared. He was working with a Hollywood star who’d just pulled a music icon into his movie. Maureen O’Carroll would have been delighted to know her youngest child was headed skywards.
‘I just felt this screenplay was going to be brilliant.’
But was Anjelica committed to the project as an actor, a director – or both? Brendan had to find out. However, he couldn’t call her agent and ask; that would seem to be disloyal, so he had to subtly coax the truth out of her.
‘I said to her, as we were having coffee in this lovely restaurant on Malibu Beach, with Greg Smith, “Just a little thing, Anjelica. When you get to Dublin, would you prefer a house – or an apartment? It’s just that if you had people coming over you might prefer a house . . .” Now, if she’d replied, “Well, we’ll see closer to the time . . .” that would mean she wasn’t about to star in this movie. But she didn’t. She said, “Erm, we haven’t really discussed a director yet.”
‘Greg chipped in, “Well, Anjelica, as you know, we have Emma Thompson as director.”
‘“Oh, she’s completely wrong for this.”
‘“And I watched as Emma Thompson flew right out of the window.”
Did this mean the film was doomed? Brendan looked at Greg Smith. There was a moment’s silence and then Greg said to Anjelica, ‘Would you consider directing it yourself?’
‘Yes,’ came the reply. ‘We’ll give you your movie. And we’ll cast Agnes as someone else. When I think about it, I’m too severe-looking to play Agnes.’
In reality, this was the best possible news. Anjelica wasn’t right for the part and she knew it. But she was still part of the project, and her association would open cinema doors. Win-win!
And to seal Brendan’s delight, Anjelica had someone in mind who was perfect to play Agnes.