Ann Brebner — agent for Bay Area actors, Marin theater booster
Ann Brebner, a leading figure in the Bay Area’s film scene and a longtime presence in Marin County theater, died Friday in San Rafael. She was 93.
Through trained as a stage director at London’s Old Vic, the New Zealand native became best known as an actors’ agent for movies at a time when Hollywood had rediscovered the Bay Area as a good place to shoot films. She and then-husband John Brebner established Brebner Agencies Inc./San Francisco Casting — popularly known as the Brebner Agency — in 1961 and turned it into the go-to place for directors shooting films and TV shows in the region, casting and scouting locations for everything from “Harold and Maude,” “Bullitt” and “The Streets of San Francisco” to George Lucas’ “American Graffiti” and Woody Allen’s “Take the Money and Run.” She also was one of the first people to read Lucas’ original “Star Wars” script.
One of her harder jobs, she once told The Chronicle’s Ruthe Stein, was finding a boy Allen thought was good-looking enough to play him as a child in “Take the Money and Run.”
The Brebner Agency flourished in the ’60s and ’70s, providing much-needed temporary employment for Bay Area actors. Ms. Brebner was proud of her part in helping to launch the film careers of such talents as Peter Coyote, Danny Glover and Kathleen Quinlan.
“I would not have a career if Ann Brebner hadn’t taken a gamble on me,” Coyote told the Pacific Sun in 2004. “I came into her office with no SAG card, no AFTRA card, nothing but hunger and belief in myself, which she chose to share. All my good luck — everything — stems from her initial act of faith in me.”
Her most lasting monument, however, may be the California Film Institute’s Christopher B. Smith Rafael Theater in San Rafael, home of the Mill Valley Film Festival. Having left her casting agency in the early ’80s, Ms. Brebner joined the board of the film festival and, together with its executive director, Mark Fishkin, led the successful drive to restore and reopen the Art Deco movie theater.
She always considered herself principally a theater person, though. Ms. Brebner grew up in Timaru, a town she once described as “about the size of San Rafael” (and about 100 miles from “the next sizable town”) on New Zealand’s South Island. Her mother having died in childbirth, she was raised by her father, a dentist, and his aunt. As a child, she was already making up plays and performing them for friends.
A scholarship took her to London, the Old Vic and what looked to be a promising directing career when she met and married fellow student John Brebner. Upon graduation, she turned down a 34-week contract in Stratfordupon-Avon to follow her husband to Marin. They worked with a small theater in Sausalito and started a children’s theater program, then, at the same time they began their casting agency, founded the Marin Shakespeare Festival in San Rafael. That company closed in 1973 but lives on in spirit through its successor, the Marin Shakespeare Company, which has produced a summer festival in the same Dominican University amphitheater since 1980.
Ms. Brebner wrote a popular acting manual, “Setting Free the Actor” (Mercury House, 1990), and kept her hand in many small Marin companies. She served as an adviser to the Marin Shakespeare Company founders and worked, as director or adviser, with the now-defunct Shakespeare on the Beach in Stinson Beach and Porchlight Theater in Ross, for which she wrote a stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales. More recently, she’d been working with San Rafael’s AlterTheater, as a director and playwright, where her adaptation of Anne Lamott’s “Hard Laughter” (co-written with Laurel Graver) and her well-received “Dead Girl” premiered.
She is survived by a son, Alexander. Memorial plans are pending.