Pamela Brown

With her cat-like eyes and authoritative beauty, Pamela Brown specialized in playing powerful women, although almost exclusively in supportive roles. Her reputation was originally made on the British stage, where she debuted in the lead, opposite Peter Glenville in the 1936 Stratford-upon-Avon production of "Romeo and Juliet." Her most acclaimed film work was with the directing/producing team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. In the 1945 classic "'I Know Where I'm Going!'," she played Catriona, an earthy, independent woman who guides heroine Joan away from the comfortable marriage Joan is planning. She plays Nicklaus, the muse of Hoffmann in Powell & Pressburger's 1951 adaptation of the opera "The Tales of Hoffmann," memorably suggesting the character's supernatural power. Powell lived as a couple with Brown in her final years (as a devout Catholic, she never remarried after her divorce from actor Peter Copley), and Powell himself commented on her unusual power, "She was a witch: women adored her; men feared her, and for the same reason -- she fascinated them." By the mid 1950s, she began to appear in Hollywood prestige films, including the role of the prostitute Christine who inspires Vincent Van Gogh in the painter's biopic, "Lust for Life." She played high priestesses and queens in 1963's "Cleopatra," 1964's "Becket," and 1966's "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum." Rarely in good health (she suffered severe arthritis since her teens), Brown died of pancreatic cancer in 1975, at the age of 58.