Phoebe Brand

Phoebe Brand was an American actress born on November 27, 1907, in Syracuse, New York, and raised in Ilion, Herkimer County, New York. Her father was employed as a mechanical engineer at the Remington Typewriter Company. Brand's Broadway career spanned from 1925 to 1939, encompassing productions including The Little Poor Man, The House of Connelly, Big Night, Awake and Sing!, and Golden Boy.

Brand began her performing career in her late teens, appearing in several revivals of Gilbert and Sullivan musicals. At age 18 she joined the Winthrop Ames Gilbert and Sullivan Company, performing in a production of The Mikado in Columbus, Ohio, in 1928. After relocating to New York City, she became one of the founding members of the Group Theatre in 1931, an organization characterized by The New York Times as a radical company that addressed social issues facing the United States during the Depression era.

Her association with the Group Theatre produced some of her most prominent stage work. In 1935 she played Hennie Berger in Clifford Odets's Awake and Sing!, and in 1936 she created the role of Minny Belle in Kurt Weill's Johnny Johnson. The following year she appeared as Anna in Odets's Golden Boy. The Group Theatre summered at Pine Brook Country Club in Nichols, Connecticut, in 1936, where Brand was among those in residence.

Brand married actor Morris Carnovsky, a fellow Group Theatre member, in 1941, having relocated to Hollywood in 1940. The couple had one child, Stephen Carnovsky, and Brand also raised a niece. She continued to work professionally under her maiden name throughout her career.

In 1952, director Elia Kazan named Brand and Carnovsky as Communists during his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, resulting in both being blacklisted and largely prevented from working in film and on stage. In 1953, the two appeared off-Broadway in The World of Sholem Aleichem alongside a cast of other blacklisted performers, a production assembled to demonstrate that New York theater audiences would not shun them. The production ran for two years. Brand later described that period as a killingly frightening time in her life.

During the years of the blacklist, Brand turned to teaching and worked as an acting instructor in New York. In the early 1960s she co-founded Theater in the Street, an acting troupe that performed classic plays in both English and Spanish in New York's poor neighborhoods, and she served as the organization's artistic director. In 1969, she appeared in a small role alongside her husband in Tyrone Guthrie's production of Lamp at Midnight during a U.S. tour. In 1994, she was part of the cast of Louis Malle's film Vanya on 42nd Street, which documents a collaborative staging of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya.

Brand died of pneumonia in New York City on July 3, 2004, at the age of 96.