A new film is being planned about the life of the real Mrs Brown, the mother of Irish comedian Brendan O’Carroll and the inspiration for his hit TV comedy series.
Eilish O’Carroll, Brendan’s sister who plays his sister Winnie McGoogan in Mrs Brown, says she’s been approached by a film company wanting to make a movie about the family matriarch, Maureen O’Carroll.
Maureen was a remarkable woman who combined being the mother of 10 children with a successful political career as a TD in the 1950s. She was fiercely left wing and a champion of the working class.
She is perhaps best remembered for having taking major food companies to court in a campaign to stamp out overcharging.
She was also instrumental in ensuring that women were admitted into the police force, An Garda Siochna. She lost her seat in 1957 but didn’t give up on public service. She concentrated on trade union work and set up a women’s refuge.
Brendan was her youngest child and he has often talked of the close bond between them. He says he based Mrs Brown on Maureen and still thinks of his mother when wondering how to develop the plots in the show.
“When I’m writing, I think, ‘What will Agnes do?’ and then wonder what my mother would do. She gives me the answers. My mother still speaks to me every day.”
Eilish, 62, told the Irish Mirror: “I was approached by an independent producer, who said she was really, really keen to do something on my mother.
“It’s in its infancy, but she has come up with a treatment and done the very first draft. Even I, on reading the treatment, went, ‘My God, this is a woman I’d love to sit down with and ask her to tell me about her life.
“A lot of women have been written out of history, but it will be lovely for this woman to finally have her day.”
Maureen O’Carroll died in 1984 aged 71.
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