New Delhi, July 19 -- DUBLIN - When Brenda Fricker walked to the podium at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on March 26, 1990, she became the first Irish actress to win a competitive Academy Award in decades. She said, simply, that anybody who gives birth 22 times deserves one of these. The audience laughed. The industry took note. The woman who played the mother of a disabled Dublin artist had just delivered one of the most unsentimental performances in Oscar history.

Fricker died Thursday in Dublin, following a period of ill health, her agent Phil Belfield confirmed to the BBC. She was 81. "We will never see her like again," Belfield said, "and the world is lesser for the lack of her."

She won Best Supporting Actress at the 62nd Academy ...