Judy Pace, a pioneering television and film actress in the 1960s and ’70s who helped show that Black women could play more than just one-dimensional characters, died on Wednesday in Marina del Rey, Calif. She was 83.
Her death was announced by her daughters, Shawn Pace Mitchell and Julia Pace Mitchell, who said she died in her sleep while visiting family.
In 1968 and ’69, Ms. Pace played the ambitious, selfish and sharp-tongued Vickie Fletcher on the prime-time soap opera “Peyton Place.” It may have been the first time a Black woman was an antagonist on a major television series.
Ms. Pace’s Fletcher was a character that viewers could love to hate, a departure from the saintly or servile roles that had historically been offered to Black actresses.
“I think ‘Peyton Place’ is more honest in dealing with the sorts of problems people are really into,” Ms. Pace said in an interview with the critic Roger Ebert in 2012. “You go to the movies and if you see a Black girl, she’s a goody-two-shoes. All the Black women in the movies seem to be nurses, schoolteachers, social workers. Black women lead real lives, baby; they’re not all doctors’ wives.”
Judy Lenteen Pace was born on June 15, 1942, in Los Angeles, where her parents had moved from Mississippi. She was the third of four children of Edward Pace, an airplane mechanic, and Luretha (Griffin) Pace, a dressmaker known as Kitty. Her parents also owned and operated Kitty’s Place, a ladies’ apparel shop.
Ms. Pace graduated from Susan Miller Dorsey High School and studied sociology at Los Angeles City College. One of her sisters modeled and encouraged Ms. Pace to do the same, and she appeared at the Ebony Fashion Fair in 1961 and later modeled for Fashion Fair Cosmetics.
She made her film debut in 1963 in “13 Frightened Girls,” an espionage movie directed by William Castle featuring a group of diplomats’ daughters played by an international supporting cast. (Not all were cast accurately, according to nationality: Ms. Pace, for example, portrayed a Liberian.)
That role led to her becoming the first Black woman under contract at Columbia Pictures. In 1965, she was the first Black bachelorette to be featured on the popular television show “The Dating Game.”
Reviewing the 1968 film “Three in the Attic,” Mr. Ebert lauded Ms. Pace as “a quick, funny actress who can put an edge on a line and keep a scene sparkling.”
In the 1970s, she was seen often in blaxploitation films, the subgenre of vibrant, often low-budget movies that tended to feature Black protagonists who were detectives or hustlers, with funk soundtracks.
Ms. Pace’s comic timing was highlighted in “Cotton Comes to Harlem” (1970), the first Hollywood-financed film to be directed by a Black man, Ossie Davis. She was a sophisticated jewelry thief in the 1972 heist film “Cool Breeze,” and in “Frogs,” also from 1972, she played a model who opts for sisterhood across a class divide when she shares a scene with a Black servant.
In 1971, Ms. Pace played the wife of the football player Gale Sayers in “Brian’s Song,” the hugely popular, critically acclaimed TV movie about Sayers’ unlikely interracial friendship with Brian Piccolo, a teammate dying of cancer.
Ms. Pace earned an N.A.A.C.P. Image Award for outstanding actress in a drama series for her role as Pat Walters, part of a group of idealistic law school students, on the television show “The Young Lawyers.” During the 1970s, she also made frequent guest appearances on popular series like “Bewitched,” “I Dream of Jeannie,” “Sanford and Son” and “Good Times.”
Ms. Pace married the actor Don Mitchell in 1972. The couple had two daughters before divorcing in 1984.
In the 1960s, she had dated the baseball star Curt Flood. They reconnected after her divorce and were married in 1986.
Mr. Flood’s legal challenge to baseball’s reserve clause helped pave the way for free agency in professional sports. His efforts angered many in the sport and essentially ended his career, preventing him from retiring with Hall of Fame-worthy statistics.
After his death in 1997, his family, including Ms. Pace, worked to keep his legacy alive and continued to press for his induction into the Hall of Fame.
“I think the holdup is that he got on a lot of people’s nerves,” Ms. Pace told The Associated Press in 2020.
In addition to her daughters, she is survived by a grandson.
After her death, the TV journalist Ed Gordon wrote in an Instagram post that Ms. Pace was one of the Black faces seen most regularly onscreen in her era.
“If you grew up in the ’70s, like I did,” Mr. Gordon wrote, “you remember what a trailblazer she was.”
Jonathan Abrams is a Times reporter who writes about the intersections of sports and culture and the changing cultural scenes in the South.
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