Biography
Brynda Mattox has a recurring role as the catatonic grandmother on the popular series Euphoria created by Sam Levinson. She is also doing dubbing work for Netflix as a part of their foreign television series. Prior to that, she appeared as the former Eskimo whore in the Fred Armisen/Bill Hader Documentary Now! "Kunuk Uncovered" spoof written by Seth Meyers and guest starred as a homeless woman on "Days of Our Lives." Recently, her writing partner, Tom Porter and she have adapted their highly successful, critically acclaimed play, The Grand Finale, into a screenplay or possibly a series. The action centers around an actors' retirement home where Golden Girls and Golden Guys live and includes the young staff who work there. Brynda and Tom are reaching out for producers to check out this madcap caper. The Grand Finale offers unending situations for hilarious and thrilling "joy rides" with this exotic mix of characters.
Brynda has been an activist almost as long as she has been acting and producing. This is not a career to her way of thinking but a description of the lifestyle that she has lived. Brynda was born on the top of an unnamed mountain in the coal mining community of Blue Diamond, Kentucky in the heart of Appalachia and was the only child of older educators who taught there. Both of her parents had master's degrees, and her grandparents were college graduates as well. She was imbued with the sense of responsibility that each of these marvelous souls exhibited in their respective communities. After Blue Diamond was destroyed, she moved with her parents to Lexington, Kentucky where she had a leading role in the senior play, John Van Druten's, I Remember Mama. She played clarinet in band and orchestra and competed in state and national contests on both clarinet and piano and was chosen to play in the Kentucky All State Band. When she graduated from high school at 16, she received the prestigious Lexington Community Award from Henry Clay High School due to her community outreach. This award included a complete academic scholarship to Transylvania University in Lexington, KY.
Brynda continued her activist and artistic work at Transylvania. She sang with the choir and in a select group called the Madrigal Singers, became a member of Phi Mu sorority, and kept her clarinet and piano skills for a long time as well as being a cheerleader for the "Transy Pioneers". She was instrumental in integrating her college in the fall of 1963. She marched with Martin L. King, Jr. in the March on Frankfort, KY in March 1964 and was Chairwoman of the Accent on Religion Week while serving as co-president of the Student Chrisitan Association. In addition, she had leading roles in Kaufman and Hart's, You Can't Take It With You, Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge, Terrence Rattigan's Separate Tables and Berthold Brecht's Galileo. Brynda was inducted into the Who's Who in American Colleges and Universities in 1964 and received the Outstanding Senior Award, the first woman ever to do so. She also received a full scholarship to Yale Divinity School.
While at Yale, she started one of the first after school programs for at-risk children in America in the Edgewood neighborhood in downtown New Haven, CT and initiated the Yale Cabaret Theatre in the International Student House where she performed Tennessee Williams' This Property Is Condemned, T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party and Eugene Ionesco's The Lesson. The next year the Yale Drama School started its Cabaret Theatre which is now a permanent fixture there. Brynda received Honor's in Public Speaking at Yale Divinity School and attended the first Vietnam War protest in Washington, D.C. in November 1965 and was listed in the first edition of Outstanding Young Women in America that same year.
Upon her graduation from Yale with an M.A. in Religion, Brynda worked for the London Methodist Church as a youth counselor in the working-class area of Battersea and became a special teacher for very advanced and very slow learners in the London Borough of Hillingdon. She traveled extensively during her 2 and 1/2 years abroad and was in Israel during the Six Day War in 1967. She was in Turkey and Cypress and camped through Europe and the former U.S.S.R. including the former Czechoslovakia as well as Poland and Hungary. She was able to experience a 12 day Atlantic crossing through the International Student Card leaving from Southampton to New York. Upon her return to America, she became deeply involved with the Judson Poets Theatre in Greenwich Village whose artistic director was the late, great Rev. Al Carmines. Her picture was in the June 1972 issue of LIFE magazine with the cast of A Look At The Fifties. Brynda was a majorette in this Al Carmines' hit.
Brynda was a Recreation Supervisor in Bellevue Hospital while attending classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. While at Bellevue, she had the opportunity of working in conjunction with New York University to establish training for hard core unemployed individuals for positions as recreation workers in assisted living and nursing homes. She established on-ward coffee hours brought to patients on carts and the Bellevue Summer Carnival which included all the departments contributing booths in the front garden area. The crowning achievement for her was the United Nations Children's Film Festival which entailed the children in Bellevue Children's Hospital selecting films from UNICEF's Children of the World film series which had been produced by her college friends, Jane Cardwell Nelson in Geneva, Switzerland. Children in the surrounding neighborhood of Bellevue Hospital were invited to see the stories of youngsters from other countries. Once a month, more than 500 children attended these educational, inspiring, and awesome films.
Her work in New York was equally challenging as the Director of Entertainment for Hospital Audiences, Inc., a nonprofit organization. Brynda initiated and administered programs sponsored by the American Theatre Wing, the National Musicians Union, the New York Council for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. These grants brought live entertainment to prisons, state schools, mental and general hospitals in and around New York City. She worked with Charlie Mingus, Thelonious Monk and Olatunji and the Drums of Passion as well as others to bring musical performances to prisons. Olatunji's group was the first show she had set to perform at Sing Sing prison on the day of the Attica riots, September 9, 1971. She had to convince the warden to not lock down all the prisoners and let the concert go on and cool the situation there. The warden agreed, and you could not hear a pin drop in that facility during the show. Eventually, the entire cast of Godspell was taken to Rikers Island. Finally, play-writing workshops and productions were established that created a venue for writers like Miguel Pinero of Short Eyes fame to begin writing while they were incarcerated.
Brynda was the Director of the University of Kentucky Summer High School Drama Institute for several years and was instrumental in taking Gorey Stories to Broadway. It opened in NYC at the Booth Theatre in October 1978. Brynda played the role of Lady Celia in the original production. Upon her completion of her second M.A. in Acting and Directing from the University of Kentucky, Brynda moved to Los Angeles where she eventually created the role of Brenda Sue, a ditsy Dolly Parton wannabe maid who can't make a decent cup of tea, in the television talk show spoof, Tea With Michael Raye. This show was a combination of British and American humour/humor. Brynda worked on this show for three years as an actress, producer and publicist during which time with the help of Linda Nolan, the show evolved into a talk show spoof in a situation comedy. Tea With Michael Raye was the top cable access program when this service was in existence. Tom Porter was also a producer along with the late Michael Raye, Linda Nolan and Brynda.
When the show ended, Brynda took a lengthy trip back to England, Scotland and Wales, in particular, since she is of Welsh extraction on both sides of her family-Griffith and Mattox. This time in addition to revisiting Amsterdam, Paris and Florence, she boarded a boat in Venice that went through the Adriatic Sea revisiting Athens and eventually arriving in Alexandria, Egypt. After visiting Cairo, she went to Nairobi, Kenya to stay several months with an old college friend who had helped integrate Transylvania. Cynthia Mann Mandiza was there for seven years helping the youth of African nations establish credit unions in order to hang on to some of the enormous amounts of wealth that their countries contained. This was an extraordinary experience especially the Vanishing African Safari in which she camped out all the way up to Lake Turkana which borders Sudan and Kenya.
Brynda has produced and acted in six bi-coastal productions with roles written specifically for her: a one woman show, Attic Lies/Attic Prayers by the late Louis Z. Bickett II, Flesh Failures by Dennis Embry, and Quivering Heights by the late Tony McKonly and the late Ivan Polley. She created the role of Bonnie Bell in The Grand Finale, a play by Tom Porter and with supplemental material by Brynda. She also spent ten years teaching a highly successful senior citizens acting class culminating in an invitation to perform the one-act play Live Spelled Backwards: A Moral Immorality Play by Jerome Lawrence in the NOHO Arts Festival. This one-act play was presented in several local bars in Hollywood since all the action takes place in a bar in Morocco.
Presently, Brynda is the chaplain of the American Legion Auxiliary, Post 43 in Hollywood as well as a Board Member of the Argyle Civic Association. Both she and her late husband, Cliff Rapp, were actively involved in helping house homeless veterans. Before being widowed, she and Cliff spent several years in Yucatan, Mexico where Cliff had his own television show and later, they visited Colombia and Hong Kong. Following his death, Brynda's acting has increased exponentially. Bruce Foreman has written a comedic film for her, presently entitled Touring America about an older couple who go on a Bonnie and Clyde bank robbing spree. It's a hoot.
Brynda is also entering into uncharted creative territory since she is writing her memoir formerly titled Portrait of a Hillwilliam (a hillbilly with class) suggested by the late comedic genius, Jim Varney. One chapter has already been published in the Kentucky Explorer magazine. However, several friends have suggested that the title, Appalachian Princess, is more apropos. The late Rev. Al Carmines, the associate minister at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, always called her that. She has written a ballad, Blue Diamond Girl, about her early childhood in this company town, six miles outside of Hazard, KY. Due to automation, the Blue Diamond Coal Company completely destroyed this once thriving community which now no longer exists.
