While touring the Soviet Union in a Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (later the Royal Shakespeare Company) production of "Hamlet" in 1958, she met the spy Guy Burgess. This meeting became the basis of Alan Bennett's script for the television movie "An Englishman Abroad" (1983) in which Browne played herself, apparently including some of her conversations with Burgess. Burgess, who had found solace in his exile by continually playing the music of Jack Buchanan, asked Browne if she had known Buchanan. "I suppose so", the actress replied, "we nearly got married". On the BFI TV 100, a list compiled in 2000 by the British Film Institute (BFI), chosen by a poll of industry professionals, to determine what were the greatest British television programmes of any genre ever to have been screened, "An Englishman Abroad" was listed at No. 30.