Judy Pace, who portrayed strong-willed characters on the ABC series Peyton Place and The Young Lawyers and in the Ossie Davis-directed action film Cotton Comes to Harlem, has died. She was 83.
Pace died Wednesday in her sleep in Marina del Rey while visiting relatives, family spokesperson Joseph Babineaux told The Hollywood Reporter.
The elegant Los Angeles native also portrayed an artist alongside Christopher Jones in the sex romp Three in the Attic (1968) and was a featured player opposite Ray Milland in the cult ecological horror thriller Frogs (1972).
And in Brian’s Song, she played Linda Sayers, the wife of Chicago Bears great Gale Sayers (Billy Dee Williams). That landmark ABC telefilm, also starring James Caan, was seen by 55 million people — half of those in the U.S. who owned a TV at the time — when it aired on Nov. 30, 1971.
Ahead of her time, Pace recurred as the complex, resilient Vickie Fletcher on 15 episodes of the fifth and final season (1968-69) of the ABC primetime soap Peyton Place, then co-starred as attorney Pat Walters with Lee J. Cobb and Zalman King on the 1970-71 ABC drama The Young Lawyers (she received an NAACP Image Award for her work).
In the box office success Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), she was memorable as the foul-mothed Iris Brown, the girlfriend of Calvin Lockhart’s reverend character.
“I loved the extreme heat that I had to go through — from being overdone and glamorous to getting beat up and being thrown in jail,” she told Tom Lisanti in an interview for his 2001 book, Fantasy Femmes of Sixties Cinema.
Judy Lenteen Pace was born on June 15, 1942. Her parents came to L.A. from Mississippi; her father was an airplane mechanic and her mother was a dress maker who owned Kitty’s Place, said to be the largest Black-owned ladies apparel shop west of Mississippi at the time.
She attended Dorsey High School and Los Angeles City College and, trained by her sister Betty, worked as a model for the Ebony Fashion Fair during its 1961-62 national tour. Later, she served as the first TV and print spokesmodel for Fashion Fair Cosmetics, helping broaden representation in advertising and fashion.
Pace made her onscreen debut as a teenager from Liberia in the spy film 13 Frightened Girls (1963), directed William Castle, and had a big year in 1966, when she showed up on the big screen in The Oscar and Billy Wilder’s The Fortune Cookie and on episodes of Batman, Bewitched, I Spy and Run for Your Life.
Talking with Roger Ebert about her role on Peyton Place, she said: “I play a character who has hang-ups like everybody else. I’m not exactly a lady on the show, I suppose; I’m pregnant, running away from the police and blackmailing the doctor. And I don’t come from the suburbs; I come from Harlem.”
In 1973, she starred with Jim Brown in The Slams (1973), directed by Jonathan Kaplan, and showcased her singing, dancing and comedic skills as Adelaide in an all-Black production of Guys and Dolls that was imported to Las Vegas from Broadway.
Her résumé also included turns in the movies The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), Cool Breeze (1972) — a blaxploitation remake of The Asphalt Jungle — and Up in the Cellar (1970) and on I Dream of Jeannie, Mod Squad, Shaft, Medical Center, Kung Fu, Sanford and Son, Good Times and The New Odd Couple.
In 1971, she co-founded the Kwanza Foundation alongside Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols. The organization aimed to support Black women working in film and provide scholarships to minority students pursuing careers in the arts.
Survivors include her daughters, actress Julia Pace Mitchell (Sofia Dupre on The Young and the Restless) and Shawn Pace Mitchell; her grandson, Stephen; and her son-in-law, Otto. Another sister, singer Jean Pace, wife of musician and activist Oscar Brown Jr., died in 2016.
Pace was married to Ironside actor Don Mitchell from 1972 until their 1984 divorce and to baseball star and free agent pioneer Curt Flood from 1986 until his 1997 death.
She and Flood had dated years earlier after he first spotted her in 1965 as the first Black bachelorette on The Dating Game, and she was a fierce advocate for his legacy, pushing for him to be enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown (it hasn’t happened yet).
Donations in her memory can be made to the NAACP.
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