Vanessa Brown (born Smylla Brind, March 24, 1928 – May 21, 1999) was an Austrian-born American actress who worked in radio, film, theater, and television. Early life Born in Vienna, Austria, to Jewish parents (Nah Brind, a language teacher, and Anna Brind, a psychologist), Brown and her family fled to Paris, France, in 1937 to escape persecution by the Nazi regime. Within a few years, the family had settled in America, and Brown auditioned for Lillian Hellman for a role in Watch on the Rhine. Fluent in several languages, the youngster impressed Hellman, and she was signed as understudy to Ann Blyth, eventually doing the role of Babette on Broadway and in the touring production. In high school, she wrote and directed school plays. She graduated from University of California, Los Angeles in 1949, having majored in English. While there, she was movie critic and feature writer for the Daily Bruin, the campus newspaper. Radio Brown's IQ of 165 led to two years of work as one of the young panelists on the radio series Quiz Kids. She specialized in literature and language. In her adult years, she had an interview program on the Voice of America. She was heard on Lux Radio Theatre, Skippy Hollywood Theatre, NBC University Theatre, and Theatre Guild on the Air. Film Brown was a junior member of the National Board of Review, the critical panel serving the motion picture industry. RKO Radio Pictures brought her family to Los Angeles, and Brown made her film debut (as Tessa Brind) in Youth Runs Wild (1944). RKO changed her screen name to Vanessa Brown and assigned her to a series of ingenue roles over the next few years. In the late 1940s, she was featured in The Late George Apley (1947), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) as Mrs. Muir's grown daughter Anna, Big Jack (1949; Wallace Beery's last movie), The Heiress (1949) and other films. She was the eighth actress to play the role of Jane, appearing in Tarzan and the Slave Girl (1950) opposite Lex Barker, followed by a role in Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). Her last film appearance was playing Millie Perkins's sister in the horror film The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976). Television In the 1950s, Brown was a regular panelist on I'll Buy That on CBS. She acted in live television dramas of the early 1950s,