Judy Pace, Blaxploitation Star and ‘Brian’s Song’ Actress, Dies at 83

Judy Pace, who is best known for her work in several Blaxploitation films including “The Slams” and “Cotton Comes to Harlem,” died Wednesday. She was 83.

Pace’s death was confirmed to media by her daughters Shawn and Julia Pace Mitchell.

Pace’s career also included roles on “Batman,” “Bewitched,” “Days of Our Lives,” and more. She played Linda Sayers, the wife of Gale Sayers, in “Brian’s Song.”

Her entry into cinema was intentional, she told Roger Ebert. Pace set up a five-year plan for making the jump. “I figured if I didn’t make it by then, I’d quit wasting my time,” she explained. “I spent two years studying, taking acting classes and workshops, things like that. Then I began to do some modeling and to get an occasional TV role. And then the ‘Three in the Attic’ role came along in the fifth year, two weeks before the deadline … Not that I wouldn’t have stretched the deadline, of course.”

Pace made her debut in 1963’s Cold War-era spy film “13 Frightened Girls,” but she and Ebert were speaking due to her role in “Three in the Attic,” which had the potential to catapult her to notoriety. At the time, she also played Vickie Fletcher on “Peyton Place.”

“I play a character who has hang-ups like everybody else,” she said of Fletcher. “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.”

As much as she was focused on her own career, Pace was equally determined to open up acting opportunities for more Black girls and women. “I think ‘Peyton Place’ is more honest in dealing with the sorts of problems people are really into,” she told Ebert. “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.”

She also credited television with creating more opportunities for Black girls and women. “The hardest thing to do,” she said, “is to find any sort of movie role if you’re a Black actress. 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.”

In 1971 she and Nichelle Nichols established the Kwanza Foundation, an organization that worked to provide more acting opportunities for Black women.

The decade also saw Pace take roles in “The Slams” and an all-Black production of “Guys and Dolls” in Las Vegas.

Judy Pace was born June 15, 1942, in California. She married “Ironside” actor Don Mitchell in 1972 (the pair divorced in 1984) and was married to her second husband, Curt Flood, from 1984 until his death in 1997. She is survived by daughters Julia Pace Mitchell and Shawn Pace Mitchell, her grandson Stephen, and her son-in-law Otto.

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