Personality
Browne's outrageous razor wit was renowned, and endless anecdotes of her circulated in theatrical circles. At the first night of Peter Brook's production of Oedipus during which a giant golden phallus was unveiled onstage, Browne turned to her companion Val Gielgud in the stalls and said loudly: "Well, it's nobody we know, darling."
Theatre critic Ned Sherrin was once asked to meet a young friend of his parents who was visiting London from South Africa and took him to a restaurant. Browne was at a nearby table. As she left she greeted Ned and then, looking at the very good-looking young man, said "Had the trip wires out at Euston again have we darling?"
When told by the Royal Shakespeare Company that there was no suitable role in their upcoming production of King Lear for her husband, Philip Pearman, she demanded a script and running through it she found the page she was looking for. "There you are", she said, "the perfect part. A small camp near Dover."
Browne's language was colourful, and an unauthorized biography of her, This Effing Lady, was published. She was a devout Catholic (by conversion). The two aspects came together in a story of her standing outside Brompton Oratory after Sunday mass when an actor came up to her with gossip about who was sleeping with someone else's wife. She stopped him in his tracks with: "I don't want to hear this filth. Not with me standing here in a state of fucking grace." Fellow Australian performer Barry Humphries paid tribute to Browne at her memorial service with an appropriate poem: "She left behind an emptiness/A gap, a void, a trough/The world is quite a good deal less/Since Coral Browne fucked off."
Read more about this topic: Coral Browne
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