Fair City star Bryan Murphy has broken his silence after he revealed he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s – saying he was in denial when doctors told him the sad news.
The Dubliner went public last week in the RTE Guide about his diagnosis, which he received from doctors three years ago.
Bryan - who plays Bob Charles on the RTE One soap - opened up for the first time since going public about his disease – saying he didn’t believe he had Alzheimer’s at first.
He said: “It came out as an actor because up until all this happened, I was able to take a three-page scene and go through it in 15 minutes and know every single line and then suddenly it started to go down and go down and then it disappeared. I was aware that this was my brain, my memory there was something wrong with it now.”
The 73-year-old thought initially it was because he was getting older.
But he said it “broke his heart” that he knew his memory was going as an actor because his trademark was learning his lines so fast.
“It’s pretty heart-breaking really,” he told Ray D’Arcy on RTE Radio 1.
His wife Una Crawford O’Brien said the hard part was getting Bryan to process his diagnosis.
She said: “The hard part was Bryan accepting it in a way. That took a while but once he acknowledged it, once he faced it, that was the easy part. "Bryan is a performer as well as everything else so he felt that if he could come out and talk to people and tell them about his journey and show them that it is not the end of the line, and that is why he decided to do it.
“It’s a huge thing to take on because when you hear the word Alzheimer’s… it did take a long time for Bryan to process it and he put it down to age a lot.”
Una revealed it took her three months to pluck up the courage to say it to Bryan about getting his memory checked.
“We were doing a play and I just noticed that he was having great difficulty learning the lines, which was just not him and that was in the January of 2019. "We got through the play and then I suggested to him one day on a beach in the middle of Kerry and there was nobody else on it that maybe he would go see about it and he accepted that immediately.
“It took me about three months to gather my courage together. The beach in Kerry was the right place to do it and I was very wary of saying it because I didn’t want to make him angry. I didn’t want to upset him either by saying I noticed your memory isn’t the best so I kind of tiptoed around it.
“I think you have to say it as gently as possible but say it.”
Una said it was “a gradual thing” telling Fair City bosses about Bryan’s diagnosis, saying producers already could sense there was a problem.
“In a way it was a gradual thing. There was no big announcement as much, they began to realise themselves there was a problem. That was really how it came about. They were fantastic.”
She praised the crew and cast members on the soap, saying “the staging are brilliant, they produce things for him to hide a script under”.
“And a lot of them wouldn’t really have acknowledged it as such because if Bryan can’t remember something he would very often make it up. He’s an actor.”
Una told how they have a white board in the bedroom, which reminds him of his schedule for the day, as well as a clock that tells him the day, time and month.
“They’re the first two things he sees in the morning,” she said.
Una – who has been married to Bryan for 16 years – said it was “an awful shock” when she was told by doctors.
“It was a shock. It was an awful shock when I first heard it. My mother had Alzheimer’s and my grandmother had dementia and it was a terrible shock. I was rehearsing a play at the time and it was probably the best thing I could do because I had to get in to go rehearsing but as time went on I realised it wasn’t the end at all as Bryan said it is not the end, it is just a different life and slowly we have acclimatised ourselves to it.”
But she admitted she sometimes finds it “extremely stressful”.
“But I think now that it is out in the open it will make it that much easier for me. I think so,” she said.
He said his children remain optimistic about their father's diagnosis.
Bryan said: “I keep them up to date whenever I can with how it is going or how it is not going. They’re upset about it but they’re optimistic, I think. I mean maybe it is wishful thinking, but they’re kept informed.”
But Una added: “I don’t think they realise how bad it can be because they don’t see him on a day-to-day basis and when they do see him it is just for a couple of days and it is all ‘yay, where can we go now’ and even on the phone and that it is different.”
Asked if they were banking memories as a couple, Una said: “I try to live in the present in the day because I’m afraid sometimes to think of the future.”
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