Judy Pace, a pathbreaking model and star of “blaxploitation” films who appeared in television shows through the 1960s and ’70s and the hit made-for-TV movie “Brian’s Song,” died last week at age 83.
The woman once described by Variety as “the most beautiful black actress in Hollywood” died in her sleep Wednesday while visiting family in Marina del Rey, her family said.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Pace graduated from Dorsey High School and studied sociology at Los Angeles City College. Her family said she was the first Black woman under contract with Columbia Studios, the first Black bachelorette on “The Dating Game” and the first spokesmodel for Fashion Fair Cosmetics.
She won her first film role in 1963’s “13 Frightened Girls” as a diplomat’s daughter but found greater renown as a backstabbing schemer on the ABC soap “Peyton Place” a few years later. In 1970, she won an NAACP Image Award for her role as an unapologetic career woman on the series “The Young Lawyers.”
Pace had “a rather schizophrenic career,” according to the Encyclopedia of African American Actresses in Film and Television by Bob McCann. She had “good girl” roles, such as a football player’s wife, in the 1971 TV film “Brian’s Song,” and played characters of “bland, perky professionalism” in shows like “I Dream of Jeannie” and “The Flying Nun.”
In contrast, McCann wrote, her feature film roles were “militant, overtly sexual, cocky, totally confident characters.” She played the scheming, seductive Iris in the 1970 blaxploitation comedy classic “Cotton Comes to Harlem.”
One of the characters introduces her character with the warning: “She’s a stone fox — watch your ass.”
McCann numbered her among the “last generation of truly pioneering black actresses,” along with Brenda Sykes, Pam Grier and Rosalind Cash.
The critic Roger Ebert praised Pace as “a quick, funny actress who can put an edge on a line and keep a scene sparkling” in his (otherwise negative) review of the 1968 film “Three in the Attic,” in which Pace played a wronged, revenge-seeking girlfriend.
Pace told Ebert that she had devised a five-year plan for breaking into film, and had won the role just two weeks before her self-imposed deadline. “Not that I wouldn’t have stretched the deadline, of course,” she said.
Discussing the self-serving conniver she played on “Peyton Place,” she said: “All the black women in the movies seem to be nurses, school teachers, social workers. Black women lead real lives, baby. They’re not all doctors’ wives.
“The hardest thing to do is to find any sort of movie role if you’re a black actress,” she told Ebert. “People don’t realize that. They talk about Sidney Poitier and Jim Brown — but where are the actresses? … Let’s face it. If it weren’t for TV, all the young black actresses in Hollywood would be unemployed.”
She had roles in the TV shows “Bewitched,” “Batman,” “I Spy,” “Days of our Lives,” “The Mod Squad,” “Kung Fu,” “Sanford and Son,” “Ironside” and “Good Times,” among other shows.
She married and divorced actor Don Mitchell and later married baseball legend Curt Flood, who took a stand against baseball’s reserve clause and died in 1997.
Accepting an award in 2019, Pace described her life as “the most magnificent, incredible ride ever.”
“This is my 77th year — I am having a ball,” she told a cheering crowd. “I’m a native Californian. I have to thank my mom and my dad for getting the hell out of Jackson, Miss., and making their way to the Pacific Ocean, where you can be anything you want to be.”
Pace is survived by daughters Shawn Pace Mitchell and Julia Pace Mitchell, a grandson, and a son-in-law. The family asks for donations to the NAACP in lieu of flowers.
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