The daughter of Mark and Annie (née Kirshenbaum) Klot,[3] Brown grew up in a large, extended Jewish family of Russian descent.

[2] At the age of 17, she appeared at the Embassy Club in London in April 1951 to mixed reviews [5] and she then went into a number of stage presentations at the Empire, Leicester Square for three months.

[7] She returned to cabaret work at the Washington Club in London in January 1952 before recording thirteen shows for the American Forces Network in West Germany.

[12] She appeared as a singer in A Study in Terror (1965),[12] followed by a number of films, including The Fixer (1968),[12] Lock Up Your Daughters (1969), The Raging Moon (1971, for which she was nominated for a BAFTA Award), Running Scared (1972), Nothing but the Night (1973), Tales That Witness Madness (1973), Galileo (1975), The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976)[12] and The Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones (1976).

She also appeared in several television dramas, including the BBC's highly acclaimed The Roads to Freedom, a 1970 adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre's trilogy for which she sang the theme song "La route est dure".

Brown made a memorable one-off appearance as a Bloomsbury radical in a 1971 episode of Upstairs, Downstairs, portrayed music hall singer Marie Lloyd in the 1972 serial The Edwardians, and took the role of Mrs Peachum in The Rebel, a 1975 biographical drama, one of four about Benjamin Franklin.

Discussions followed between Brown and script editor Midge Mackenzie, and the pair devised the idea for a drama chronicling the struggle for women's suffrage in late 19th- and early 20th-century Britain.

[17] Brown (and others) sang the theme song for the series, "The March of the Women", and she took the role of working class activist Annie Kenney, alongside Siân Phillips and Angela Down, as Emmeline and Sylvia Pankhurst, respectively.

[24] It was also reported the same week by Cash Box that the initial reaction to "Roll Him Over" had made Mike Collier excited, jumping for joy and he had embarked on an extensive road trip to promote Brown's single as well as "Midnight in Moscow" by Jan Burgens.

A permanent U.S. resident who lived in California, she had flown to London to appear on the bill for a tribute to Sammy Davis Jr. held that week at the Drury Lane Theatre.

[26] Before the date of the tribute she became ill and underwent emergency surgery to remove an intestinal obstruction at Charing Cross Hospital,[27] where she died from complications.