Pippa Scott, the veteran actress who appeared in such films like 1958’s six-time Oscar-nominated Auntie Mame and 1956’s The Searchers, has died at the age of 90.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, she died May 22 of congenital heart failure at her Santa Monica home, her daughter Miranda Tollman told the publication.
Born Nov. 10, 1934 to entertainment industry parents in Los Angeles — mother Laura Straub, a stage actress, and father Allan Scott, Oscar-nominated for his screenplay for 1943’s So Proudly We Hail! — Scott studied at Radcliffe and UCLA, later training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. She made her Broadway debut in 1956 in Jed Harris’ Child of Fortune. Her film career took flight that same year, when John Ford cast her in the John Wayne vehicle The Searchers, in which her character, Wayne’s niece Lucy Edwards, is abducted. (Her uncle, Adrian Scott, was a blacklisted member of the Hollywood Ten.)
Her other film credits include As Young as We Are (1958), My Six Loves (1963), Petulia (1968), Cold Turkey (1971) and The Sound of Murder (1980).
On the TV side, she was in episodes of shows such as The Twilight Zone, Outlaws, Dr. Kildare, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Perry Mason, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Gunsmoke, Mission: Impossible, The Waltons, Columbo, The Streets of San Francisco and Jigsaw John (where she had an extended episodic arc).
In 1964, she wed Lee Rich, the creative force behind Lorimar Productions, the studio that spawned both of TV’s most enduring families in The Waltons and Dallas. Though the pair later divorced, the two remained close until his death in 2012.
By the ’90s, Scott became dedicated to human rights work, founding the International Monitor Institute, a nonprofit that gathered evidence to assist in the prosecution of war crimes in the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides, among other crimes against humanity.
To further illuminate global injustices, Scott founded Linden Productions and worked to produce projects commissioned by organizations like the United Nations and Human Rights Watch. For PBS’ Frontine, she produced “The World’s Most Wanted Man,” an episode about the hunt for notorious Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic who was indicted by The Hague’s International Criminal Court. In 2006, she also produced documentary King Leopold’s Ghost, about the exploitation of the Congo by King Leopold II of Belgium.
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