Vanessa Brown, actress, playwright, novelist and journalist, 71

["Deathwatch Central" <cdw@slick.org>]

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Vanessa Brown, who made her Broadway debut at 13 and
played ingenue roles in films of the 1940s and '50s before becoming a
journalist, died of cancer Friday. She was 71.

She made her first movie at 16, 1944's ``Youth Runs Wild,'' and her other
films of the 1940s and 1950s included ``Margie,'' ``The Ghost and Mrs.
Muir'' and ``The Bad and the Beautiful.''

Born Smylla Brind in 1928 in Vienna, her family fled the Nazis when she was
9, moving first to France and then America. She heard that the producer of
the play ``Watch on the Rhine'' was looking for a girl with a German accent.
She went to the play's author, Lillian Hellman, got an understudy part and
by the end of the Broadway run was a regular cast member.

A year later, at 14, Ms. Brown joined ``The Quiz Kids'' radio show. The
popular program had a panel of children answering listeners' questions.

She also did stage work, appearing on Broadway in 1952 in ``The Seven Year
Itch.''

She left acting after marrying her second husband, director Mark Sandrich
Jr., in 1959, but returned to the screen in the 1967 film ``Rosie.''

In the 1980s and 1990s she appeared on such television shows as ``General
Hospital,'' ``Murder, She Wrote'' and ``Homicide: Life on the Streets.''

Ms. Brown also was a playwright, novelist and a journalist, publishing in
many newspapers and magazines and freelancing for the Voice of America.

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