I’ll level with you—I love a good all-over-the-place career. Oh, it’s almost impossible to have a completely solid one, unless you have the career of a John Cazale and only make five movies. But I’m fascinated by someone who has appeared in critical darlings such as The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd and also ten episodes of a podcast radio play about Wolverine and an After School Special and a made-for-TV remake of The Bad Seed. It’s so much more interesting to write about, if for no other reason than because it lets you speculate about what was making the person make the choices they did.
Blair Brown’s career is full of choices. She’s the daughter of a teacher and a CIA employee who went to study the theatre in Canada and worked for several years at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, fictionalized in Slings & Arrows. When she returned to the US and started working on the screen, she immediately appeared in prestige work like The Paper Chase, and shortly thereafter in The Great Outdoors, with John Belushi. And the Hollywood Foreign Press Association chose to give her a Golden Globe nomination for it, too.
She’s bounced around on stage and screen, continuing to do prestige stuff and Definitely Not Prestige Stuff. She’s won a Tony, for playing Margrethe Bohr in Copenhagen, but the other nominations don’t seem to have resulted in wins. She’s one of those people who seems to have consistently attracted attention from people who saw her doing things and never have made a smash on a bigger level, though I’ll admit I still haven’t gotten around to Orange Is the New Black and maybe people finally came to know her from that.
And, okay, I—like the rest of my English class from fall semester in my sophomore year in high school—predominantly know her for a production of The Skin of Our Teeth, by Thornton Wilder, which doesn’t even make her Wikipedia page. (Though it does for the play itself; it aired on American Experience, and we probably saw it taped of KCET at some point.) She played Sabina, a role that would be enormous fun to play, and did a damn fine job at it. The way she says the words “blue mold” will live in my head forever.
I wish more people would be aware of her. Which is, yes, part of the point of this column. I would love the opportunity to sit and talk to her about her career, and not just because I’d want her to do a monologue from the Wilder for me. I also wish I could find a better still of her in the show, because it’s a good production and it’s frustratingly difficult to track down anything about it. It’s probably easier to find out about her episodes of Elementary.