Who was Clarence Brown?
Clarence Brown, an alumnus and patron of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is a major figure in the history of the American cinema. In histories and memoirs he is always listed among the “superb” and “outstanding” directors. Because of his personal modesty and unwillingness to allow commercial exploitation of his career, however, the wide range of his contribution to motion picture art has never been fully explored in print. As a result, he is sometimes classified as a “subject for further research” (Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema or even as “an ‘unknown’ director” (Films Incorporated, Rediscovering the American Cinema).
Born: Clarence Leon Brown May 10, 1890 Clinton, Massachusetts
Died: August 17, 1987 (aged 97) Santa Monica, California
Marriages: Mona Maris, Alice Joyce, Marian Spies
Clarence Brown was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director six times during the 1930s. He worked with some of the brightest stars of the golden age of Hollywood, including Clark Gable, Rudolph Valentino, Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and Jimmy Stewart, making the transition from silent films to talkies with classics like The Yearling, Intruder in the Dust, National Velvet and Ah, Wilderness! Brown was the favorite director of screen legend Greta Garbo. They worked together on several films, including Anna Christie, perhaps Brown’s most celebrated motion picture. Over the course of his career, Brown directed 52 feature-length films which were nominated for 38 Academy Awards and received eight.
Clarence Brown Theatre Box Office
The Clarence Brown Theatre is a pillar of the east Tennessee arts community. Many of our shows sell out, and 35,000–40,000 people attend CBT shows each year. We enjoy the strong support of University leadership. The Clarence and Marian Brown Endowment, the state of Tennessee, and generous support from our community provide us with a stable financial foundation, and we are developing new resources to better our facilities, creative excellence, and national reach.
Clarence Brown Theatre and UT Department of Theatre
The Department and the CBT are fully integrated in all aspects of mission and function. That our students are able to practice alongside first-rate professionals enables us to compete among the finest University theatre programs in the world. Our MFA programs recruit among the most elite professional programs, and our BA program is a leader in the region, offering a strong liberal arts degree with exceptional performance, design, and production opportunities.
“She has this great appeal to the world because she expresses her emotions by thinking them. Garbo does not need gestures and movements to convey happiness, despair, hope and disappointment, joy or tragedy. She registers her feelings literally by radiating her thoughts to you.”
—Clarence Brown, about Greta Garbo