Inevitable Hollywood beckoned and Brown was cast in several acclaimed TV productions ranging from the NBC miniseries "Captains and the Kings" (1976) to the award-winning "Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years" (ABC, 1977). She has continued to offer incisive and distinguished performances in the medium. In the 1983 NBC miniseries "Kennedy", Brown was applause for her sympathetic portrayal of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. She was the at first unsuspecting mother of a murderous child in the remake of "The Bad Seed" (ABC, 1985) and played the first female general who runs for the US Presidency in "Majority Rule" (Lifetime, 1992). While her finest TV role remains the independent Molly Dodd, Brown also excelled at tightly-wound, often wealthy matriarchs as in "A Season in Purgatory" (CBS, 1996) and "The Ultimate Lie" (NBC, 1996). She co-hosted (with Toukie Smith) the Lifetime talk show "Talk It Over" (1995) and briefly returned to series TV as a no-nonsense US attorney in the short-lived "Feds" (CBS, 1997).
Brown debuted in features in "The Choirboys" (1977) but came into her own as a leading lady opposite William Hurt in "Altered States" (1980), although her subsequent appearances have been infrequent. (Brown often put her family before her career.) One of her best screen roles was in 1981's "Continental Divide", playing a take-charge naturalist romanced by a newspaper reporter (John Belushi). David Hare wrote the leading role of Lillian Hempel, an expatriate American doctor living in London who begins a romance with a mysterious man, in "Strapless" (1989) for her. (He also penned the stage play "The Secret Rapture" for her as well). More recently, Brown returned to Broadway as star of Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia" (1995) and as Frau Schneider in "Cabaret" (1998-99) before returning to features in a key supporting role in "The Astronaut's Wife" (1999)