Judy Pace, groundbreaking actor from 'Peyton Place' and 'Brian's Song,' dies at 83

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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 praise...