The Bizarre Story Behind The Other Mrs Brown’s Boys Movie

The BBC sitcom is one of the corporation’s biggest hits and the movie adaptation made more than £20million at the box office. But did you know that Mrs Brown first found herself on the big screen all the way back in 1999?

Origins

Comedy-drama ‘Agnes Browne’ starring Anjelica Huston was supposed to be called ‘The Mammy’.

That’s the name of the novel by Brendan O’Carroll – aka the creator and star of ‘Mrs Brown’s Boys’ – which Huston wanted to turn into her second feature as director.

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It soon became clear to the producers (including acclaimed Irish filmmaker Jim Sheridan) the title wouldn’t fly in America, as people thought it was about early movie star Al Jolson. There was also the similarity to blockbuster ‘The Mummy’, which was due out the same year.

‘Agnes Browne’ is set in 1967, the story of a resourceful but poor Irish widow raising seven kids in Dublin. She gets in hock to a loan shark, her best friend gets cancer and then Tom Jones comes to save the day in the end, paying off Agnes’ debts and dedicating a song at one of his concerts to her. Seriously.

In fact, Jones was never meant to be in it. The original script, which was co-written by O’Carroll, had Cliff Richard as the pop star of the finale, but Huston changed it because of Jones’ “raw, sexual power”.

Rosie O’Donnell was tapped to play the main role and Gerard Depardieu flirted with playing baker Pierre, who asks Agnes out.

It seemed like a straightforward, whimsical little indie film, but didn’t turn out that way.

Production

For starters, O’Donnell dropped out just a few weeks before shooting and faced with the changing Irish seasons which would affect the look of the movie, Huston decided to play the heroine herself. Ironically, it echoes what happened to O’Carroll himself when the character Mrs Brown was first due to appear on radio in 1992. The actress O’Carroll hired fell through, so the writer (below in 1996) performed the role instead.

Depardieu’s involvement never came to anything, Ray Winstone signed up as baddie Mr Billy and filming got underway in Dublin in 1998. “I tend to find courage in adversity, so I got cracking,” said Huston. “But I had no idea how much more effort it would take to both act and direct. I had to plumb the depths of my resources.”

Amidst rumours in the trade press of production costs escalating, O’Carroll managed to write himself into the cast as Seamus the local drunk. “I thought, I’ll be fe***d if I’m making a movie I’m not in,” he said later.

The Tom Jones concert finale was filmed at the Gaiety Theatre with members of the Tom Jones Appreciation Society in the audience, dressed in 60s garb.

The Welsh legend could do the singing part fine, but struggled with his lines. An anonymous source on the production told Lucy Ellis, author of ‘Tom Jones Close Up’, “Tom only has two lines, he has to deliver a brief dedication to Anjelica’s character before launching into ‘She’s a Lady’, but he just couldn’t get them right.”

The really funny thing? ‘She’s a Lady’ was released in 1971, four years after ‘Agnes Browne’ was set.

At the time, O’Carroll was happy to say what great friends he’d become with Jones and contradicted the insider about how successful the singer had been in his scene.

“I cried. I just cried,” he said. “I was sitting in the front row of the Gaiety Theatre and I think a lot of people cried as well, because the way he said it was just so moving.”

Aftermath

The film premiered in the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes 1999 and Jones did a concert on the beach at the after-party.

Huston was pleased with her work, saying, “I loved working in Ireland. I spent my childhood there and grew up surrounded by the Irish character.”

By 2014, O’Carroll was happier to disagree, saying that Huston had “no feel for Dublin life” and suggesting he was disappointed in the end product. “It needed a few more laughs,” he told the Radio Times.

One thing the comedian can empathise with were the bad reviews, something that has been a feature of ‘Mrs. Brown’s Boys’ since its BBC debut.

“What can one say about a film whose idea of comedy is having the two women sit around discussing whether or not they’ve had an ‘organism’ or not?” wrote one reviewer of the film, while Variety called its quality “barely a notch above TV movie of the week”.

‘Agnes Browne’ was a flop, earning only £106,000 at the US box office.

Nevertheless, the project had a happy ending for Brendan O’Carroll. He’d been trying to make it as a comedian and actor for decades, even getting himself over £2million in debt following the making of the disastrous 1998 film ‘Sparrow’s Trap’. But after the movie, he wrote a series of plays featuring a broader version of Agnes (with a now-shortened name), using family members to play the other parts.

A BBC executive saw a performance at the Glasgow Pavilion and realised there was a TV show in it. The rest is history.

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Image credits: Rex_Shutterstock, BBC