Virginia Brissac

Virginia Brissac
Virginia Brissac c. 1904
Born	Virginia Alice Brisac (1883-06-11)June 11, 1883 San Jose, California, U.S.
Died	July 26, 1979(1979-07-26) (aged 96) Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S.
Occupation	Stage and Screen Actor
Years active	1913–1955

Virginia Brissac (June 11, 1883 – July 26, 1979) was an American West Coast stage actress who came out of retirement in her early 50s to begin what would turn out to be a twenty-year career as a performer in cinema and television productions. She was known as an in her early theatrical years, in her latter career Brissac’s stern features often led her to play schoolteachers and other authority figures rôles. She is perhaps best remembered today as Jim Stark’s (James Dean) grandmother in the 1955 film, Rebel Without a Cause.

Virginia Brissac was born in San Jose, California and later raised in San Francisco. She was the daughter of B. F. Brissac, a well-to-do Bay Area insurance executive, and was said to be a niece of the actress Mary Shaw. As a young girl she began a collection of autographs that would grow to include such notables as Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, Richard Mansfield, Henry Irving and Rudyard Kipling. When she wrote Kipling asking for his signature, his secretary wrote back informing her that the writer would grant her request if she would be willing to donate $2.50 to a certain London charity. In her reply some weeks later Brissac wrote:

Enclosed is the $2.50 for your Fresh Air Fund. I suppose you thought that when I saw $2.50 I’d give up the idea of your autograph, but I didn’t.You see I have had to save for soldiers here, for we have wars of our own once in a while, and as I’m only a little school girl with an income of 50 cents a week, you can see it has taken me some time to get the $2.50 together. But here it is and I am waiting for your autograph.

Brissac’s letter was forwarded to Kipling who was in India at the time. Her reply so amused him he sent her his autograph along with the following passage from his poem, In the Neolithic Age:

"But my Totem saw the shame; from his ridgepole-shrine he came, And he told me in a vision of the night: – "There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, "And every single one of them is right"

By 1902 Brissac was a lead player at San Francisco’s Fischer’s Theatre opposite the Bay area actor Reginald Travers (c. 1879–1952). In September of that year the two performed at a church benefit in a specialty act billed as Reginald and Virginia Brissac Travers. A month later they starred together at Fischer’s Theatre in a hit farce entitled A Pair of Lunatics. After his death in San Francisco nearly fifty years later, Travers was described by The New York Times as a pioneer little theatre impresario and civic leader.