Jim Sheridan Reveals He Blamed His Father for BrotherS Death
Oscar-nominated director Jim Sheridan has opened up about his intricate relationship with his late father, saying that “somewhere deep down” he blamed him for his brother’s death, and recalled the poignant last moment he and his father shared.
The acclaimed Dublin filmmaker appears in a special hour-long St Stephen’s Day episode of Keys to My Life, the RTÉ show in which presenter Brendan Courtney meets Irish personalities who reveal how the places they’ve lived in have shaped their lives.
the My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father director visited his childhood home in a boarding house off Dublin’s Sheriff Street, where he recalled how his teenage years shaped his relationship with his father, Peter Sheridan.
“By the time I was 16/17,I was a little monster. I remember taking him on, on everything, arguing with him on everything,” he said.
“This got very serious when my brother died, as somewhere deep down, I blamed my father for his death – who had nothing to do with it.”
Jim Sheridan (pictured here in 1998) speaks about the grief of losing his younger brother Frankie.
Sheridan’s younger brother Frankie died of a brain tumour in 1966, aged 10 years old.
“He was only 10, so everybody in the family believed they where somehow responsible for his death,” Sheridan said.
“I remember the day he died,the moment he died. I just slid down the wall. For me, it came at the same time as I was becoming an adult, so it was complicated.”
He remembered an incident when his father hit him in the face and one of his teeth fell out.
“I was in such a rage, I went upstairs and pulled a mirror off the wall and went down, kicked the door in and held it up in front of my dad and said, ‘Look at yourself’,” the filmmaker told Courtney.
Sheridan said he came to forgive his father later in life.
“I always made him the bad guy in films and plays, and then one day I realised, it’s just a product of our history – that all the fathers are bad fathers, and he’s a great guy,” he said.
Jim Sheridan with his parents – mother Anna in fur coat and father Peter with glasses – at the My Left Foot Dublin premiere.
“So I started saying to him, ‘I think I’ll make a movie about a good father’. And I made Giuseppe [Conlon, the father of gerry Conlon] in In The Name of the Father.
“On the opening night [of the film], my dad’s here with my mother – she’s the prototype for the mother and he’s the prototype for the dad.
“He came down and hugged me in The Savoy, and in this ear, he said, ‘I love you’. I looked at him, but I didn’t say ‘I love you’ back. I was so shocked.
“He was dead two weeks later. I never saw him again.”
brenda Kneapsey and Seamus Sheridan (1969) presenting Motley aged 19, from the TV series Keys To my Life.