‘You were the best’: Dodie Brown, beloved Kansas City actress for over 50 years, dies

Fans will remember Dodie Brown for the many characters she brought to life on Kansas City stages, in productions such as “Mame,” “The Sound of Music,” “Steel Magnolias,” “My Fair Lady” and “On Golden Pond.”

But her daughter says Brown would want to be remembered for her joy.

“Her joy, celebrating life every day, even when she was at the age when there were challenges,” daughter Melissa Cooper said Wednesday. “She found the joy in every day. That’s how I remember her. She really did live her life well.”

The grande dame of Kansas City theater died Aug. 1 at home in Kansas City. She died of natural causes, Cooper said.

Smashing reviews have poured in of an acting career that spanned more than 50 years on Kansas City stages. A packed house is expected next month at a celebration of her life.

Kansas native Dolores “Dodie” Katherine Myers Brown made her name at the city’s popular dinner theaters — Tiffany’s Attic Dinner Playhouse and Waldo Astoria, which combined to become the New Theatre & Restaurant in Overland Park, where she was considered the “figurehead.”

Brown also made notable appearances at the American Heartland Theatre and Missouri (now Kansas City) Repertory Theatre.

On her last two outings, Brown went to church and then to see the musical “Dreamgirls,” currently at New Theatre, said Cooper, who lives in Overland Park.

New Theatre audiences watched Don Knotts, Jamie Farr, Morgan Fairchild, Marion Ross, Sally Struthers, Tom Bosley and a playbill of other celebrities perform with Brown.

Often, she got louder applause than the guest stars from Hollywood.

“Every star she did shows with, they adored my mother,” said Cooper. “She impressed them, this local girl from Hutchinson, Kansas, and Kansas City.”

Brown’s obituary mentions that she died “surrounded by the treasures of a life well-lived, just as she wished.” Struthers made a painting for her. And Cooper found a book with a heartwarming inscription from “M*A*S*H” star Mike Farrell among her mother’s things after she died.

Knotts, who, like Farrell, starred with her in “On Golden Pond” at the New Theatre, became a close friend. He once told The Star that Brown “could have done very well in New York.”

But Cooper said her mom told people she chose to “be a big fish in a small pond,” where she could put family and community first.

“The people in the audience haven’t just watched me perform for years, they know me,” Brown once said. “It’s just a lot of good friends.”

Mourning a theater legend

“Dolores Katherine Myers Brown, known to all as DODIE, left this world as she entered it — with a bigger than life presence, delighting audiences … from the little girl dancing in front of her adoring grandmother, to the vast number of theater audiences who cheered her hundreds of stage performances,” reads a memorial on the New Theatre website.

Fans have left hundreds of comments on the New Theatre Facebook page.

“She was one of a kind. I’ll remember her smile.”

“I’m a greeter at the theatre. Every time I saw (Dodie) she treated me like a friend. She will most definitely be missed.”

“Loved her in all of the plays we saw her in, over the past 35 years.”

“Everyone loved my mom,” said Cooper. “She touched a lot of people throughout the world.”

Brown famously never revealed her age, though many a journalist tried to get it from her. Her high school outed her many years ago as a member of its Class of 1950.

But year of birth is typically listed in an obituary, and Cooper decided it was time.

“At this point I think we can tell the truth,” she said.

So this is the big reveal in Dodie Brown’s obituary: She was 90.

All those heart-shaped rocks

Fans would not be surprised to know that Brown was just as vivacious and charming off stage as she was when performing. She taught her two daughters that everyone deserves to be treated the same, whether they carry mail, collect trash or walk red carpets.

In interviews over the years, friends and directors spoke fondly of Brown’s generous spirit, demonstrated by her practice of presenting people with heart-shaped rocks.

The rocks found her, she didn’t find them, she would say.

“You’d never believe how many have come to me,” Brown told The Star in 2005. “Sometimes I see them, sometimes friends bring them to me. The first one came to me after my mother died. They tell me everything is going to be all right.”

She was known for paying forward the “gifts” she felt had come her way in life. In 1994 she founded the New Theatre Scholarship Guild, a nonprofit that has raised more than $1 million for future theater artists. The guild has awarded 17 scholarships to students attending regional universities, including the University of Kansas, Kansas State University and the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

“One of the best. RIP, Dodie,” the KU theater and dance department wrote on the New Theatre Facebook page. “We certainly will carry on your ‘star spirit’ here at the University of Kansas. We thank Dodie for her enthusiasm toward and support for our creative Jayhawks.”

In that 2005 interview with The Star, Richard Carrothers, co-founder of New Theatre along with Dennis Hennessy, marveled at the “mystical, spiritual energy that travels with her in life. It comes from the fact that she is doing what she was born to do.”

When Brown’s alma mater, Hutchinson High School, added her to its Wall of Honor, the alumni association quoted Brown’s grandmother, who once told her: “You’ve been doing that jumping around ever since you were a little girl.” Brown used to stage plays on her grandmother’s porch.

Destiny found her in high school, where she performed in both drama and music. In 1954 Brown graduated from KU, where she earned a master’s degree in music education. Even after she began acting, Brown used her days off to direct the St. Peter’s and All Angels Episcopal Church Choir.

She taught music at Old Mission Junior High School in Roeland Park until she married former Navy pilot Robert “Buddy” Brown. They adopted two daughters and were married for 63 years. He died in 2020 during the pandemic, but not from COVID, said Cooper.

As the girls got older, Brown began acting in amateur plays at places like the Barn Players Theater in Prairie Village before her professional career took off.

In an interview with The Star several years ago, Cooper called being the child of a working actor “a really interesting way to grow up.”

“I used to read lines with her while I rubbed her feet, she loved that,” Cooper said. “I served hors d’oeuvres and drinks at the parties, and there would be stars sitting there enjoying dinner just like everyone else.”

Cooper began to cry when she talked about how she and her sister, Jennifer Brown Harnick, came into their mother’s life.

Brown chose them.

“My sister and I were adopted. and I was the lucky one because she saved me,” Cooper said. “I don’t think i would have had anywhere the existence I did.”

Family first

As much as Brown adored her life upon the stage, New Theatre officials wrote, it was her family “that stole the biggest part of her heart.”

“One of Dodie’s greatest joys was welcoming, each summer, all her grandchildren, Katherine, Robert, Reese, Maggie & Dean for Cousin Camp,” the theater shared.

In a 2003 interview with The Star, Brown herself made those priorities clear.

“I have a family — a husband, two children, three grandchildren, one on the way. That’s my life,” she said.

“There was a really ditzy gal here one time, a kind of flash-in-the-pan, sexy little gal from California. And I remember people interviewing her and she’d go, ‘Oh, acting is my life.’

“I thought, ‘Oh, dear.’

“She disappeared. But we all went around going, ‘Oh, acting is my life.’“

A Celebration of Life service will take place at 5:30 p.m. Monday, Sept. 25, at New Theatre & Restaurant, 9229 Foster St. in Overland Park.

In lieu of flowers, memorial donations can be made to The New Theatre Scholarship Guild or the Dodie Brown Musical Legacy Fund at St. Peter’s and All Angels Episcopal Church in Kansas City.

Brown didn’t like to wish her fellow actors luck before a performance with the usual “break a leg.” It felt too negative.

So before she went on stage, she told her colleagues, “Ding ding!” Everyone knew what she meant, her daughter said.

“The final bow is yours, Ms. Brown,” the New Theatre wrote.

“Ding-Ding. You were the best!”