When Brenda Fricker broke Al Pacino’s heart: “Hold on a minute”
You’d probably recognise Brenda Fricker’s face even if you don’t recognise her name. The Irish character actor has appeared in dozens of high-profile films over the years, including A Time to Kill, Home Alone 2, So I Married an Axe Murderer, and Albert Nobbs. She even became the first female Irish actor to win an Oscar when she nabbed the award for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ for her role in My Left Foot in 1990. To this day, only three other Irish actors have earned Oscars, though Daniel Day-Lewis has made up for the omission by winning three.
Whenever an actor wins an Academy Award, they are invited back to the ceremony the following year to present the statuette in the same category for the opposite gender. So in 1991, Fricker was tasked with announcing the award for ‘Best Supporting Actor.’ It was a stacked year. Andy Garcia was nominated for The Godfather Part III, Joe Pesci was nominated for Goodfellas, and Al Pacino was nominated for Dick Tracy, a crime thriller that also starred Warren Beatty and Madonna. In addition to these heavy-hitters were Native American actor Graham Greene, who was nominated for Dances with Wolves, and Bruce Davison for his role in Longtime Companion, which was the first widely released movie to address the AIDS epidemic.
Most people thought Pacino had it in the bag. It was his sixth nomination, and if nothing else, the Academy might have offered it to him as a consolation prize for so many years of near misses. Fricker certainly thought so. Unfortunately, that assumption led to awkward consequences. During an appearance on the Tommy Tiernan Show in 2021, she remembered bumping into Pacino backstage before the award was announced and how she got a little too confident with her predictions.
“I was coming out [of the toilet] with the envelope and I saw out of the corner of my eye this elderly man on the bannisters,” she said. “It looked like he was in trouble. So, I said, ‘Hold on a minute,’ and I went over and said, ‘Are you alright?’ and his face came up and it was Al Pacino.”
Brushing aside the fact that Pacino was barely 50 at the time and therefore not an “elderly man,” he was, apparently, quite distressed about going through yet another ceremony not knowing whether he would win. So Fricker tried to put his mind at ease.
“I said, ‘But you’re going to win, this is the envelope, your name is in here, there’s no problem with that,’” she recalled. This seemed to soothe Pacino, who picked himself up off the floor and left. Fricker had not, in fact, opened the envelope, and when she did (while standing on-stage in front of the live audience), it was Joe Pesci’s name that she read aloud.
The actor did not say whether she spoke to Pacino after the ceremony, but it’s safe to say that she was not his favourite person that evening. To his credit, he didn’t look particularly shocked when Fricker said Pesci’s name – he immediately began to clap like all good sports are required to do for their victorious rivals. Luckily for him, he only had to wait two years to get back to the Oscars, and he did it in style by snagging a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ nomination for Glengarry Glen Ross and finally winning ‘Best Actor’ for Scent of a Woman.
