The Oscar-winner Brenda Fricker has a habit of speaking her mind in interviews. In the past year she has berated vacuous Los Angeles airheads, image-obsessed New York women and money-obsessed Dubliners. Last week she took aim at the Irish film industry, which has apparently “cut her dead”.

During a media interview to promote the inaugural Maureen O’Hara award at the Kerry Film Festival — Fricker will be the recipient — she declared herself “hurt and puzzled” at being shunned in her native country.

“You’re being asked to travel 5,000 miles around the world to work with good directors, good actors and good scripts. And they're doing good stuff here and nobody even bothers to check your availability,” she complained.

“I’ve gone over it in my head and I can’t come up with the answer. As somebody said to me recently, Daniel [Day-Lewis] and I winning the Oscars [for My Left Foot] restarted the film industry in Ireland; we were personally responsible for getting it going again. You’d think they would be aware of that at least and try to include you. But it’s the opposite: they just cut you dead. It’s very odd and hurtful.”

The Maureen O’Hara award honours women who have demonstrated leadership and bravery in film, so Fricker is a fitting first recipient. O’Hara was the feisty Irish lass of post-war Hollywood films, best remembered for her performance in 1952 opposite John Wayne in The Quiet Man. Fricker, as the mother of a severely disabled son, Christy Brown, in the 1989 Jim Sheridan film My Left Foot, showed the Irish mammy at her toughest best.

Both actresses were thereby typecast. For O’Hara, a glamorous redhead, film roles began to peter out after she turned 40. Fricker had come into her own as an older actress; she was 45 when she won the Oscar. Since then she has worked steadily, making occasional and memorable appearances as strong older woman with quiet dignity on Irish television screens.

But clearly, despite continued success, Fricker is dissatisfied with her lot and not afraid to make that known. She is a loner, almost reclusive, according to her friend Nell McCafferty. “Too reclusive for her own good sometimes,” the journalist and writer said.

Fricker lives alone with her dogs. Her husband, Barry Davis, from whom she was divorced, died in 1990. Surprisingly for such an icon of Irish mammydom, she has no children.

For some time now she has been out of work thanks to a fall in which she broke bones in her shoulder, elbow and thumb. She had taken to playing the stock market in recent years, and is now suffering the consequences. Though seven years shy of the now-means-tested medical card for the over-70s, she is particularly incensed by the government’s handling of the issue. “It was so disgusting I can hardly even talk about it,” she declared.

Fricker is an accidental actress. She was born on February 17, 1945, the second daughter of Bina and Desmond Fricker. Her father was a journalist at the Irish Times and a press officer at the Department of Agriculture in the 1960s. Bina was a teacher at Stratford College, a Jewish school in south Dublin.

The family lived in relative comfort in Dundrum. The young Brenda went to Loreto on the Green, one of Dublin’s most fashionable girls’ schools. Her older sister, who had acting aspirations, was sent to boarding school in Mayo. Bina was ambitious for her daughters. The two girls took music, drama and Irish dancing lessons; Brenda was a national junior champion three years in a row.

She once told an interviewer that her mother’s training method was to play a fast jig on her fiddle and whip her daughter’s legs with the bow if she wasn’t leaping high enough.

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