"To Kill a Mockingbird" Actress Collin Wilcox Dies at 74

[Zoneboy]

NY Times

Collin Wilcox, a ubiquitous actress whose face was familiar to television viewers in the 1960s and afterward for her guest appearances on shows like “The Untouchables,” “The Twilight Zone,” “The Defenders” and “Gunsmoke,” died on Oct. 14 at her home in Highlands, N.C. She was 74.
The cause was brain cancer, her husband, Scott Paxton, said.

A fresh-faced Southerner, Ms. Wilcox was also billed over the years as Collin Wilcox-Horne and Collin Wilcox-Paxton. Besides working actively in television, she appeared in Hollywood films and several Broadway plays.

Her best-known film role was as Mayella Ewell, the young white woman who falsely accuses a black man (played by Brock Peters) of rape in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the 1962 adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel. Ms. Wilcox’s tearful testimony on the witness stand as Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch cross-examines her is widely considered one of the movie’s most memorable scenes.

Ms. Wilcox made her Broadway debut in 1958 in “The Day the Money Stopped,” a drama by Maxwell Anderson and Brendan Gill. Though the play closed after four performances, she won the Clarence Derwent Award from the Actors’ Equity Association as the year’s most promising female performer.

Collin Wilcox was born on Feb. 4, 1935, in Cincinnati and moved with her family to Highlands as a baby. In the late 1930s her parents helped found a local theater company, the Highlands Community Theater, where she got her first stage experience.

Ms. Wilcox studied at the University of Tennessee, what was then the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago and the Actors Studio in New York. In Chicago she performed with the Compass Players, an improvisational group that was a forerunner of the Second City theater troupe.

On television Ms. Wilcox came to wide attention in 1958, when she starred in a live television production of “The Member of the Wedding.” (An adaptation of Carson McCullers’s novel, it was directed by Robert Mulligan, who later directed “To Kill a Mockingbird.”) To land the role of Frankie, the story’s preadolescent heroine, Ms. Wilcox, then in her early 20s, appeared at the audition with her hair shorn, her breasts bound with dishtowels and her face dotted with “freckles” of iodine.

Ms. Wilcox’s first marriage, to Walter Beakel, ended in divorce, as did her second, to Geoffrey Horne. She is survived by her third husband, Mr. Paxton, whom she married in 1979; three children, Kimberly Horne, Michael G. Paxton and William Horne; and three grandchildren.

Her other television appearances include guest roles on “Dr. Kildare,” “The Fugitive,” “Ironside,” “The Waltons” and “Little House on the Prairie.”

Among Ms. Wilcox’s other films are “Catch-22” (1970), “Jaws 2” (1978), “Marie” (1985) and the TV movie “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” broadcast on CBS in 1974.