The long-term partner of Bread star Bryan Murray has given a heartbreaking update about his battle with Alzheimer's. The BBC sitcom legend, who played Shifty Boswell, the charming but dodgy cousin of the main protagonists, in the Carla Lane-penned show between 1988 and 1991, was diagnosed with the condition in 2019. Last year, his love of two decades, fellow actor Una Crawford O'Brien, made the difficult decision to admit the star, who also played the evil domestic abuser Trevor Jordache in Channel 4 soap Brookside, to a full-time care home.

"He is now safe. I am content for him. That's as good as I can get; he seems content there. He needed to be in a safe place, and here wasn't it," she confessed of their Dublin home. "I never thought he would end up in a nursing home. I thought I could cope - that I could look after him. But it became almost a physical impossibility. Even the silly things, like our bathroom, are so tiny upstairs. So, helping him to wash or shower - it became an impossibility," she said.

She visits him regularly and admitted: "I look at him sometimes and he looks the same. Sometimes he has a look in his eye that you know isn't Bryan.

"But sometimes he'll look at me and his little twinkle is still there and I kind of go, 'Gosh, what we have lost',"she told the Sunday Independent.

The couple first met in 2005 and have been together ever since, but decided not to officially marry, having both already been through the process.

Although diagnosed in 2019, Bryan only went public with his condition in 2022 and continued to work on Irish soap Fair City until he announced his retirement in April 2025.

Bryan became a huge star thanks to his role in Bread, which won him a BBC Personality of the Year award.

Two years after Bread ended, he became one of the most hated men in Britain when he landed the role of the abusive Trevor Jordache in Brookside.

He made his debut on March 8, 1993 and only appeared on screen for around two months. However nhe left a lasting legacy as the character was stabbed to death by his wife Mandy (played by Sandra Maitland) to protect theirdaughter, Beth (Anna Friel).

This led to the famous "body under the patio" storyline as they hid his corpse for two years before it was discovered and they stood trial.