Fionnula Flanagan Movies

Made for television, A Winner Never Quits is the true story of one-armed baseball player Pete Gray. Having lost his arm in a childhood accident, Pete (played by Steve Rees as a child, Keith Carradine as an adult) still insists upon pursuing an athletic career in emulation of his older brother Whitey (Ed O'Neill). When Whitey suffers permanent brain damage in a boxing match, Pete takes up the cudgel and enters the world of professional sports. Hired in 1943 as a "freak attraction" and wartime morale-booster by the Memphis Chicks, Class-A minor league ball club, Gray attains a batting average of .333 and a stolen-base record of 63; as a result, he is appointed his league's MVP. Though a success, Pete maintains a tough, defensive veneer, which is softened only by the love of his wife Annie (Mare Winningham) and the adulation of baseball fan Nelson Gary Jr. (Huckleberry Fox), who has also lost an arm (and who would, in real life, become a top minor-league ballplayer himself). With the war depleting big-league baseball's manpower in 1945, Pete Gray finally achieves his goal of entering the Majors when he is hired by the St. Louis Browns. Dennis Weaver and Fionnulla Flanagan costar as Pete's immigrant parents. Burt Prelutsky's screenplay wisely avoids pathos and sentiment throughout; though humanized by his relationships with friends and family, Pete Gray is accurately portrayed as a brusque, temperamental soul, who neither asks for nor tolerates sympathy from anyone. A Winner Never Quits first aired in April of 1986. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this spooky made-for-television movie, a mother, endlessly bereaved after her daughter mysteriously drowned years before, becomes convinced that her late child is trying to contact her from the Great Beyond. Naturally nobody believes her until it is almost too late. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Screenwriter Callie Khouri makes her directorial debut with this adaptation of a pair of popular novels by author Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Little Altars Everywhere. Sandra Bullock stars as Sidda Lee Walker, a New York playwright who opens a can of emotional worms with her estranged, boozy mother, Vivi (Ellen Burstyn), when she discusses her painful childhood and particularly Vivi's less-than-enviable mothering skills in a Time magazine article. The eccentric Louisiana drama queen Vivi has already been barred from her daughter's oft-delayed wedding to her fiancé, Connor (Angus Macfadyen), so the article sends her into a rage. Coming to the rescue of the relationship are Necie (Shirley Knight), Caro (Maggie Smith), and Teensy (Fionnula Flanagan), a trio of bickering women, who, along with Vivi, formed a secret society of feminist empowerment and friendship 60 years earlier that they dubbed the "Ya-Ya Sisterhood." The Ya-Yas kidnap Sidda and bring her home to Louisiana, where they reveal to Sidda via a carefully maintained scrapbook her mother's painful past (with Vivi portrayed in flashback by Ashley Judd), effecting a rapprochement between mother and daughter. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood also stars James Garner. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide

Four men come together to find out how and why the woman who raised them was killed in this hard-edged urban drama from director John Singleton. Short-tempered Bobby (Mark Wahlberg), struggling musician Jack (Garrett Hedlund), streetwise Angel (Tyrese Gibson), and hard-working Jeremiah (Andre Benjamin) are four guys who don't appear to have much in common, in terms of either race or temperament. However, these men have one very important bond -- all four were adopted and raised by the same woman (Fionnula Flanagan), and they all love her as a mother, and respect one another as brothers. When their mother is killed during a robbery at a grocery store, the four brothers come together for the funeral, but when they don't get straight answers about what happened to her, they begin looking into the crime themselves. The deeper they dig into the case, the more the brothers begin to suspect that the shooting wasn't an accident, and that powerful and unexpected forces were involved. Four Brothers marked one of the first starring roles for Andre Benjamin, better known as Andre 3000 of the top selling hip-hop group OutKast. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

In this tribute to James Joyce, Fionnula Flanagan gives a tour-de-force performance as a half-dozen or so women in Joyce's real and fictional worlds. When she portrays his wife Nora remembering their time together, Flanagan captures the era and the author in lyrical detail. As Sylvia Beach, the woman who first published Ulysses, new dimensions concerning the importance of Nora in Joyce's literary visions of women emerge, and when Flanagan interprets Joyce characters like Molly Bloom or a washerwoman from Finnegan's Wake, the beauty of Joyce's language shines through the melodious words. With an excellent supporting cast and the fine-tuning that came from presenting this tribute on stage, the film should warm the hearts of literary buffs and Joyce fans alike. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

While Kojak (Telly Savalas) is following up several false leads in the bombing of a Manhattan restaurant, one of his detectives, Jeff Braddock (Joseph Mascolo), would seem to have inside information on the crime. Unfortunately, Braddock is unable to tell Kojak or anyone else what he knows. It seems that among those killed in the bombing was his mistress Gretchen Hodges (Judith Chapman)--and there is a strong likelihood that Braddock's own wife Molly (Fionnuala Flanagan), who suffers from mental illness, was responsible for the tragedy. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Mr. Patman is well liked and has charm to spare. He works as an orderly in a mental hospital and does a good job except that he is beginning to believe that he is being shadowed by the irate husband of his landlady. When not bunking with her, Mr. Patman attempts to launch an affair with a co-worker until he mistakenly begins believing she has died in an auto accident. As the film progresses, it doesn't take long for the audience to realize that the normal-seeming Patman is just as ill as the patients he tends to and by the story's end is no longer to conceal it and must be admitted into the hospital himself. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

In the first episode of a two-part story, Jessica (Angela Lansbury) is in Ireland, staying at a bed-and-breakfast at Ballynook Castle. Rumor has it that the castle is haunted by the ghost of a murdered woman, and the locals are convinced that the spirt is responsible for the death of a kitchen worker. Suspecting that the victim was murdered by "live" culprits who are searching for a hidden treasure, Jessica follows a trail of clues that may well lead her into a death trap! Rod Taylor and Fionnula Flanagan, both of whom had appeared in previous episodes filmed in Ireland, show up here in different roles. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

No sooner has Jessica (Angela Lansbury) shipped her latest book to the publisher than someone plagiarizes its plotline for an episode of a TV crime series. Arriving in Hollywood to track down the culprit, Jessica crosses the path of an unscrupulous producer who specializes in stealing other people's ideas. Naturally, such a fellow would have accumulated an inordinately large list of enemies--one of whom manages to kill the producer with a live bomb during a staged special-effects sequence. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide