Phil Brown knows a thing or two about the forces of evil. First he battled the Blacklist, and later the Dark Side.
Brown, ’37, is best known for his portrayal of Uncle Owen, the guardian of Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars movie, who is killed by marauders early in the film. What most people don’t know is that Brown was an accomplished actor long before George Lucas cast him in his science-fiction classic, and that his career was nearly cut short by the Communist witchhunts of the 1950s.
A drama major at Stanford, Brown moved to New York after graduation, and then to Hollywood, where he helped found the fabled Actors’ Laboratory. In 1951 he directed his first feature film, The Harlem Globetrotters, and appeared headed toward a successful Hollywood career. However, a year later, several influential anti-Communists—including Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors Guild—labeled Brown a ‘Red,’ although Brown had never been a member of the Communist Party. Deprived of opportunities in the United States, Brown moved to London, where he worked for the next 40 years as a stage actor and director and a television producer.
Now 84 and retired, Brown appeared this spring at several autograph conventions that coincided with the release of the latest Star Wars movie, Attack of the Clones. The people lining up to see him aren’t much interested in his “other” acting career, he says. “Everyone wants to know what we were drinking in the [breakfast] scene,” Brown told a Fresno Bee reporter. He doesn’t remember exactly, only that “it was blue.”
