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Coral Browne (July 23, 1913 - May 29, 1991) was a stage and screen actress.

She was born Coral Edith Brown in Melbourne, Australia, where she began her stage career. At the age of twenty-one she emigrated to England, where she became established as a stage actress. She began film acting in 1936, with her more famous roles being Vera Charles in Auntie Mame, Mercy Croft in The Killing of Sister George, and Lady Claire Gurney in The Ruling Class.

She married actor Philip Pearman in 1950; he died in 1964. While filming Theatre of Blood she met actor Vincent Price they later married on October 24, 1974. She also allegedly conducted affairs with Firth Shephard, Jack Buchanan, Maurice Chevalier, and costume designer Cecil Beaton, as well as bisexual affairs.

In 1969 she played in the original production of Joe Orton's controversial farce What the Butler Saw in the West End at the Queen's Theatre in 1969 with Sir Ralph Richardson, Stanley Baxter, and Hayward Morse.

While touring the Soviet Union in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet in 1958, she met spy Guy Burgess. This meeting became the basis for the television movie An Englishman Abroad in which Browne played herself.

She became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1987 as a gift to Price, in exchange for which he converted to Roman Catholicism as a gift to her (she had converted many years previously).

She died in Los Angeles, California of breast cancer at the age of 77.

Reference

Alan Bennett gives the date of her meeting with Burgess as 1958 in the Introduction to his Single Spies, which contains the text of An Englishman Abroad as a stage play and the text of A Question of Attribution about Anthony Blunt. Single Spies, London, Faber, 1989, ISBN 0-571-14105-6.

External links

• Coral Browne at IMDb
• Coral Browne biography and filmography at the BFI's Screenonline

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