RIP: Casting Director Ann Brebner dies at 93

Ann Brebner, doyenne of Marin stage and screen, dies at 93

Ann Brebner, the 93-year-old grand dame of stage and screen in Marin County, once told an interviewer that if she couldn’t do something she was passionate about every day, then life for her wouldn’t be worth living.

Just a few months ago, Mrs. Brebner was pursuing those passions, just as she always had. She was writing a play, working with other writers, going to the movies, looking to the future. She was even driving.

Then, just before Thanksgiving, the curtain began to come down on the last act of her extraordinary life. Her memory began to fade, her tiny body started to fail and, on her doctor’s orders, she could no longer live alone.

“She was disappointed because she spent her whole life writing and reading and remembering,” said Jean Taylor, a longtime neighbor and friend. “It got to the point where she could no longer write or read. It didn’t make sense to her. She was inside her body, feeling it was letting her down.”

Her closest circle of friends rallied to her bedside, staying with her around the clock, raising money to keep her in her home during her last days. The end came early Friday morning. Friends said she died peacefully in the tiny cottage on G Street in San Rafael where she’d lived for the past 20 years.

A HALL OF FAME LEGACY

An elegant woman with a regal bearing and snow-white hair swept back in a chignon, Mrs. Brebner leaves a legacy in film and on the stage that earned her a place in the Marin Women’s Hall of Fame and in the hearts of the many people who knew her.

“We’ve all been touched by her in many and various ways,” said Mark Fishkin, founder of the Mill Valley Film Festival. “She was a great friend to me. She was one of a kind. None of us will ever forget her.”

Perhaps her greatest and most enduring achievement was her tireless and undaunted leadership in the multimillion-dollar campaign that transformed a decrepit old San Rafael movie house into what is now the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center, a three-screen art deco landmark on Fourth Street that opened in 1999 as the home of the California Film Institute and the Mill Valley Film Festival.

In the six years it took to finish the theater, there were times when seemingly insurmountable obstacles arose that cast serious doubt over whether the project would go forward. But she and Fishkin,working as a team, saw it through.

“At one point, the whole board said, ‘Let’s give up on it,’” Jean Taylor recalled. “But Ann was a trouper. She stood solid. She said, ‘No, we’re doing this.’”

Twice president of the film festival board, Mrs. Brebner wasn’t just involved in fundraising, although she did plenty of that.

“She once had all of us neighbors standing on the street corner with coffee cans, asking people passing by to contribute a dollar,” Taylor remembered.

Once the actual work began, she put on what became her signature pink hard hat and worked alongside architect Mark Cavagnero, overseeing every phase of the theater’s design and construction.

“The Rafael Film Center would never have happened without her,” Fishkin said. “She was there every day. It’s part of her legacy.”

Former San Rafael Mayor Al Boro once called her “the spirit of the theater.”

MARIN SHAKESPEARE

Born and raised in New Zealand and trained at the Old Vic Theater School in London, Mrs. Brebner co-founded the Marin Shakespeare Festival in the 1960s with her then husband, the dashing British actor John Brebner. He died in 2013.

After the Brebners’ marriage ended in 1972, the festival ended as well. But she helped bring it back in 1989 as the Marin Shakespeare Company, directing its debut production, “As You Like It,” staged in Dominican University’s Forest Meadows Amphitheater, a bucolic venue that had been built specifically for her original festival.

Mrs. Brebner had a lifelong affection for actors and acting, and not just as a director. In the ’60s and ’70s, she ran the largest casting agency in San Francisco, finding roles for local actors in movies like “The Conversation” starring Gene Hackman, “Petulia” with Julie Christie and “Bullitt” with Steve McQueen.

She cast George Lucas’ “THX1138” and “American Graffiti.” And the first dramatic reading of his script for “Star Wars” was in her San Francisco office. Lucas once praised her as “a casting guru,” telling her in a tribute, “You’ve done so much for the film industry in San Francisco.”

ELEGANT AND EARTHY

With her distinguished British accent and air of refinement and dignity, Mrs. Brebner could be intimidating to someone meeting her for the first time. But she also had what her friend, novelist Anne Lamott, called “a very rare mix of elegant and earthy, a wonderful capacity for silliness and laughter.”

When actor Steve McQueen was in San Francisco shooting “The Towering Inferno,” for example , Mrs. Brebner found herself comforting his new wife, actress Ali McGraw.

“Ali was serious about making the marriage work,” she once told an interviewer, “but Steve didn’t give a blind f---.”

DEEP PEACE AND COMMUNITY

After her youngest son, Jay, 52, took his own life in 2015, Mrs. Brebner became a member of St. Andrew Presbyterian Church in Marin City.

“She found a deep peace and community there,” Lamott, a longtime church member, said. “She always wanted to come, no matter what shape she was in. She was embraced by everyone. We couldn’t really remember when she hadn’t been there.”

Mrs. Brebner was raised by a single father after her mother died in childbirth, and she came of age at a time when women were often relegated to traditional occupations and roles. But a woman Oscar-winning film director John Korty called “a force of nature” was never one to have her creativity and passion for the arts stifled.

A playwright as well as a director, her 2013 play, “The Dead Girl,” about two biracial families, was produced by Marin’s AlterTheater Ensemble, a troupe that stages pop-up shows in empty storefronts.

On her 90th birthday, she was celebrated at an afternoon party and tribute at Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch in Nicasio.

During an onstage interview at the affair, the Mill Valley Film Festival’s Zoe Elton asked her what advice she would give her 9-year-old self.

“Do what’s in your heart,” she replied, “not what your head thinks you should do.”

Mrs. Brebner is survived by a son, Alexander, who lives in New York. Funeral arrangements are pending.

http://www.marinij.com/article/NO/20170113/NEWS/170119897