Oscar-nominated director Jim Sheridan has opened up about his complicated 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, because somewhere deep down, I blamed my father for his death - who had nothing to do with it."
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 were 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.
"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."
Sheridan, who was the first of his family to attend university when he went to University College Dublin (UCD), also recalled his first paid gig in the arts when he presented the RTÉ children's show Motley.
"I got fired because one week they didn't have enough to cover after the Angelus, and I had to ad-lib for 15 minutes, so I got all the kids and talked about school - had they ever been beaten or slapped in school," he said.
"I went to the canteen after and the Director General came in, tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'You're fired. Archbishop McQuaid was onto us, you were talking about corporal punishment on the television'."
Sheridan graduated from UCD in 1972 and took a job in the bank, where he met and married his beloved wife Fran. The couple went on to welcome three daughters, Naomi, Kirsten, and Tess.
Sheridan and Courtney visited the family's sea-facing Dalkey home, which ended up causing them a huge amount of financial pressure and stress.
As they arrived at the house, the director said: "It's still difficult to revisit it. It's like post-traumatic stress or something like that."
After buying the old cottage on the grounds, the couple set about demolishing it to build a modern glass-facade house hanging over the sea.
"We demolished the old cottage in 2001, and it went on until 2005. We had to get permissions from the Department of the Marine and the Valuation Office and the whole lot," he said.
"The build was tough, because the old cottages were in a concrete structure - whereas we were trying to build in the sea and the Valuation Office asked us for a million to acquire the lease from the government."
The building costs quickly spiralled out of control.
"I'm good at making movies and controlling a crew, but building a house is a different business and I wasn't good at that, all a mess. I blame myself for that."
He continued of the increasing strain: "I was paying a huge mortgage on Dalkey, 20 grand a month or something. We had lots of properties that we then sold to pay the mortgage. We were so concerned with paying off our bills. God bless Fran, she'd a tough time."
Fran passed away in 2021 from a Covid-related illness, a year short of the couple's 50th anniversary.
"That was a shock, her dying. It's kind of like you don't want to move on, part of you is stuck. You have to move on, you have to keep going," he said.
When asked by Courtney if the stressful financial situation with the Dalkey house could have started Fran off on her illness, Sheridan said: "It might have exacerbated where she was at, but we had great times here too.
"My mother was still alive, and she was very happy to be here, and I think proud of the fact that I'd come from Sheriff Street and got here."
Jim Sheridan's one-hour special episode of Keys to My Life airs on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player on Friday, 26 December at 8pm.
