Brendan O'Carroll's SHOCKING! SECRET

Arrested for the murder of a pal who made him bankrupt, then a fortune teller told him he'd be a comic. Now he's worth £8million...

As foul-mouthed ­matriarch Mrs Brown, Brendan O’Carroll is one of the ­nation’s best-loved TV characters.

His award-winning BBC1 show pulls in a huge 12 million viewers, but behind the laughs the comedian has a shocking secret – he was once in the frame for murder.

Brendan’s darkest days came when he returned from a holiday in 1989 to find that his business partner Kevin Moore had cleared out the pub they owned together and had done a runner with all the fixtures and fittings, plus the cash.

Brendan, 58, was so furious he felt like killing Kevin. Three months later he learned that his former friend was at his mother’s house, and Brendan waited outside to confront him.

Kevin never showed up and ­eventually common sense told Brendan to go home to his wife and three children. But when Kevin was later found hanged, the finger of suspicion pointed at Brendan, and he was arrested.

His incredible past is revealed in his new book, The Real Mrs Brown: The Authorised Biography of Brendan O’Carroll, which charts his ­astonishing rags-to-riches story.

It tells how as the youngest of 10 children, Brendan endured an ­impoverished upbringing in Dublin but – with a trail-blazing mother, Maureen O’Carroll, who became a leading female politician – he had a driving ambition.

BETRAYAL

He thought he’d struck lucky when he had the chance to take over the Abbot’s Castle pub in Finglas, north Dublin. But that fateful day of his business partner’s betrayal he discovered he had lost everything.

Brendan says: “Kevin was gone and he’d even sold the plates and light bulbs.” Then he discovered that their bank account had been cleared out.

Brendan had no idea where Kevin – who’d had a history of drug abuse – had disappeared to, but he says he was glad he came to his senses before confronting him at his mother’s house. “Later on I thanked God I couldn’t find him,” he admits.

With debts of £96,000, Brendan had no option but to close the pub, which once had a turnover of £500,000 a year. “It was gone,” he says. “I was finished.”

He was declared bankrupt and spent the next year in court, losing case after case against suppliers and finance companies.

“At that stage, if you’d put my name into the computer, you’d have sworn that I’d murdered the bank manager’s wife, the credit rating was so bad,” he says. “I owed so much money that I had no means of paying it back.

“What destroyed me was knowing we both could have come out of the pub ­experience as seriously rich men. But Kevin sold us out for about 90-odd grand. It was nothing.”

Three years on, in 1992, things were to get even worse. He discovered that Kevin, who was gay, had contracted Aids. When Kevin had realised he was ­dying, he’d headed to Australia for a last hurrah, later returning to his mother’s house to hang himself.

Given the bad blood between the two men, police suspected Brendan, and he was arrested the following day. “The enquiries didn’t last long,” says Brendan. “It was soon established that Kevin had killed himself.”

By then at rock bottom, Brendan says it was only at that point was he motivated to turn his life around.

“I often ­reflect on it,” he says. “One thing I think about is that I have no idea what it’s like to be dying of Aids, to be totally afraid.

“And even to be gay. Being gay can be a very lonely life. And then I have to think, ‘What does it take to hang yourself? How much desperation must you feel?’ But you can’t let it affect your faith in human nature.

“If you carry grudges, they weigh you down. And anyway, it’s one of those ironic twists. If he hadn’t fecked off to Australia with the money, I might still be running a pub.”

Brendan struggled for years before making it big. He suffered the ­heartache of losing his first son, also called Brendan, who was just three days old when he died from a number of serious conditions.

At one stage he was so broke and despairing of his future that he ­visited a fortune teller. Incredibly, she told him he would achieve worldwide success as a comedian and actor. At first he laughed at the notion. “But I admit she stunned me,” he says.

“I just don’t know how she could have told me what she did.”

Then he thought of how much his friends loved his gags, and decided to give it a go.

He became a stand-up ­comedian, but the inspiration for Mrs Brown came on the spur of the moment when he was working on a radio show and was asked to come up with a comic character. He based the person on his late mother Maureen, who had died aged 71. At first an actress was hired to play the part but when she called in sick, studio bosses were going to can the show.

However, Brendan told the presenter: “There’s an easy solution. I’ll play Agnes.”

The character went on to spawn a theatre show, a series of books and then led to film and TV work for Brendan in his native Ireland. Mrs Brown has also provided him with an estimated£8m fortune.

But sadly, as his career took off, his marriage to first wife ­Doreen was crumbling. He says she had known him when he was a struggling waiter, and was suspicious of his overnight success.

Brendan explains: “Doreen’s ­perspective never changed. I was always the waiter. I had to say to her, ‘You married the ­waiter. He doesn’t exist any more’.”

They split in 1999, and in 2005 he married ­actress Jenny Gibney, 57, who worked on one of his early theatre productions and now plays his daughter on screen.

Mrs Brown’s Boys is now the biggest show on TV with last year’s Christmas special attracting 12 million viewers, beating established favourites like Downton Abbey and Call the Midwife.

Last year it won the Best TV ­Entertainment Programme award at the Irish Film and Television Awards.

The fortune ­teller’s prediction came true but Brendan says the real secret of Mrs Brown’s success is that it gives ­families old-­fashioned laughs.

“We’re in a recession and people are scared, people are a bit down,” he says. “So they need a laugh first of all and, traditionally, no matter who you are, comedy always does well in a recession. But in dark times people also get ­nostalgic. They want to look back at the times when summers were longer, Christmases were brighter and family life was better.

And we remind them of that. It is what it is. There are people who will love it and people who won’t. But I think the people who love it are the audience that comedy forgot.

“We’re redressing the balance. We’re going for the audience that loves to laugh out loud.”