Profile : Brenda Fricker’s Serious Sister Act

Brenda Fricker already had left the Catholic Church by the time the Second Vatican Council issued its instructions, in the early 1960s, to make the church more relevant to contemporary society.

But the Irish actress, who won a supporting-actress Oscar playing Christy Brown’s mother in 1989’s “My Left Foot” has returned to that era of tumultuous Catholic change in a six-hour Australian miniseries, “Brides of Christ,” which begins Sunday on the Arts & Entertainment Network.

Set in a Roman Catholic convent school in Sydney, “Brides of Christ” examines the upheaval inside the church through the stories of liberal nuns who question traditional religious doctrine and the older, conservative nuns who feel threatened by the changes.

The strength of the series, which earned acclaim during screenings in Australia, Great Britain and Ireland, is its focus on individual stories--the nuns’ roles within the convent, their problems, their relationships and, ultimately, their struggle to reconcile faith in God with man-made dogma.

Fricker plays Sister Agnes, a harsh and conservative nun who has lived a life of unquestioning obedience to Church teachings. She clashes regularly with her students and with the younger nuns who are more in tune with the times. With the arrival of Vatican II, and its call for such changes as more practical habits, Mass in the vernacular and the removal of unnecessary objects of worship, she has difficulty making the transformation.

During one tense discussion among the convent inhabitants, Sister Agnes asks bitterly, “Is it all right with you if we leave the crucifix standing?”

Fricker says she was drawn to the series for a multitude of reasons: being born a Catholic in Ireland, her belief that the era of Vatican II is such an inherently interesting subject and because, “No one’s gone into the private lives of nuns before.” And, with reasoning a little closer to Mammon, she laughs about the show-biz adage that “nuns are good box office.”

In not untypical fashion for someone raised in Dublin, Fricker attended Catholic school, an experience she recalls with disdain.

“It was all obedience and fear,” she says. “I hated it. They teach through fear and that is the wrong way.”

She was expelled from school in her senior year and had “drifted away” from Catholicism by the time she was 17. “It was more unconscious than conscious,” she says.

Fricker seems to have been shaped more by childhood tragedy than religious training. Her injuries in a car crash at 14 left her hospitalized for two years, with her parents spending their life savings on plastic surgery for her.

Soon after she was released from the hospital, she contracted tuberculosis and spent another two years in a sanatorium. Despite spending most of her teen-age years in near isolation, away from her peers, Fricker believes some good came from it.

“The positive side is, it taught me about self-sufficiency,” she says. She also developed an extraordinarily close relationship with her father, who visited her every Friday in the sanatorium.

Eventually, Fricker got a job as a journalist at the Irish Times, where her father worked. “It was pure nepotism,” she recalls.

When an opportunity arose to give acting a try, her editor told her she could have her job back if she wanted to return. She never did.

She began acting with stage companies such as Dublin’s Abbey Theatre and the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company in London. She spent five seasons in the cast of the hit British TV drama “Casualty.”

It was her performance as the determined mother of the paraplegic artist and writer Christy Brown that brought her international recognition and a supporting actress Oscar in 1990.

She said filming the “Brides of Christ” was somewhat difficult because “the heat was unbearable in that costume.” Nonetheless, “It was a pleasant time.”

Fricker was particularly interested to see how the Irish would react to the miniseries, which, while depicting a variety of viewpoints about the Catholic Church, reveals the deep pain and suffering inflicted on those who do not conform to its ideology.

The Church in Ireland was resistant to the changes during the 1960s, she says, and even now is “on the move, but not as quickly as in other countries.”

Fricker said she thought the program would provoke outrage there, but was pleased to find “it was very popular.”

These days, Fricker is living in Bristol, in the west of England, after 17 years of residing in London. Despite the possibility of enhanced career opportunities, she has decided against moving to Los Angeles.

“I didn’t like Los Angeles,” she says. “I don’t like the heat and I found it uninteresting. I wasn’t comfortable there.”

After “Brides of Christ,” American TV viewers will see Fricker again next month playing the mother of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell in the TNT miniseries “The Sound and the Silence.”

But her acting career is not all about playing mothers and sisters. Fricker is currently at work on a black comedy called “Deadly Advice.”

“I play a baddie,” she says. “I get killed very quickly.”

“Brides of Christ,” Part One, airs Sunday at 5 and 9 p.m. on A&E; Part Two airs Monday at 6 and 10 p.m. and Part Three on Tuesday at 6 and 10 p.m.