The poet and artist Christy Brown is today largely remembered as a posthumous muse to Daniel Day-Lewis, who won an Oscar in 1990 for his portrayal of the Dubliner in Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot. Brown was almost nine years dead by then, and in 2024 is talked about mostly in the context of Day-Lewis’s performance. Actor has eclipsed artist.
Christy Brown’s Self Portrait (RTÉ One, Wednesday, 9.35pm) is a commendable attempt at disentangling Brown from the Sheridan movie and restoring to him some of the prominence he had during his life.
Born with cerebral palsy, he was disabled in an Ireland where people in his circumstances were often locked away and left to whither. But Brown was determined not to be forgotten. Alex Verner’s film – narrated by Aidan Gillen and featuring readings of Brown’s work by Saoirse Ronan – passionately conveys the drive of a man who looked at the world much as a boxer regards an opponent: as something to be punched in the face until it lay stretched out on the canvas.
Verner sketches out the bare-bones trajectory of Brown’s life. We begin with his impoverished upbringing in Crumlin, his supportive mother, Bridget, and his friendship with Katriona Maguire, a social worker from a privileged background. Despite their radically different backgrounds Maguire became his lodestar – she helped draw Brown out of his shell and showed him that if the world was cruel and judgemental, there was kindness in it, too.
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One surprise is that neither Brown’s writing nor his art are highly regarded today. Both were intensely inward looking: his first book, My Left Foot, was an autobiography; the second, Down All the Days thinly-veiled memoir. His paintings, meanwhile, often consisted of self-portraits in which he depicted himself as a Christlike figure, awaiting elevation to on high – or crucifixion.
But his perspective on himself and the world did not find favour with critics. The art writer Brian Fallon is quoted as acknowledging that Brown’s work had “a sense of personal urgency but that it lacked any painterly vocabulary”. “To be successful as an artist you need to come to peace with your personhood,” he said.
“He always saw himself as normal person struggling in a body that didn’t fit him,” says Mary Duffy, an artist whose work is informed by her disability. “Christy wasn’t that interested in painting. He saw it as a means to earn a living. With all the training the world, he was never going to be a great painter.”
His poetry has been largely forgotten too – writing for RTÉ, Verner says, “Christy [was] not seen as a highly regarded poet within the clique of literary critique.”
But the idea that Brown was incomplete as a poet is countered by Ronan’s readings, where the Oscar-nominated actor resists the temptation to over-dramatise his words and lets Brown’s lithely uncompromising prose speak for itself. He also receives a generous endorsement from Booker-winning novelist John Banville. “Christy was a poet,” he says. “There is more poetry in Down All the Days and My Left Foot than in yards and yards of verse by lesser poets.”
Brown died after a long struggle with alcoholism (though the cause of death was choking). All these decades on, he remains an elusive figure. We all remember him from the Daniel Day-Lewis film, but the real Brown has passed from view – and increasingly, out of living memory. An RTÉ documentary broadcast on a random night in November won’t do much to remedy that situation. But it brings Brown to life as an artist and writer, and argues that he deserves better than to be a bit player in the story of My Left Foot’s ascension to Oscar glory.
