By Dennis McLellan
Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Collin Wilcox Paxton, 74, who played the poor Southern white girl who falsely accuses a black man of raping her in the 1962 film adaptation of Harper Lee's novel "To Kill a Mockingbird," died Oct. 14 of brain cancer at her home in Highlands, N.C.

Mrs. Paxton, then known as Collin Wilcox, was a seasoned stage actress when she auditioned for the role of Mayella Violet Ewell in "To Kill a Mockingbird." The film, set in Depression-era Alabama, starred Gregory Peck, who won an Academy Award for his performance as Atticus Finch, the kind and principled lawyer and widowed father of two who defends the accused black man, played by Brock Peters.

In a 2007 interview with her granddaughter that ran in the Buffalo News, Mrs. Paxton said she thought she could play Mayella, the daughter of a racist, because she understood both sides of the racism issue.

"I had known girls from that kind of background," said Mrs. Paxton, who grew up in North Carolina and was involved in desegregation activities with her parents in the 1950s.

At the audition, she said, "all the other girls trying out for the part were overly made up; they had curly, clean hair and wore brassieres and high heels."

Mrs. Paxton took a different approach. "I wore a secondhand dress, tennis shoes with holes in them, and dirty little white socks. I rubbed cold cream through my hair -- that's why my hair looked so dirty," she said.

She and Peters were involved in the civil rights movement and the NAACP.

"On the set, there was a main feeling that we were making a film that had meaning, had something to say," she recalled. "But no one ever expected or anticipated the kind of impact the film actually created."

Former Los Angeles Times film critic Philip K. Scheuer wrote at the time that Mrs. Wilcox "gives a rather remarkable demonstration of histrionics as Mayella, the sullen, snarling victim of an alleged rape."

Collin Wilcox was born in Cincinnati on Feb. 4, 1935, and her family moved to Highlands when she was a baby. She attended the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago and performed with the improvisational Compass Players. After moving to New York City in 1957, she studied at the Actors Studio.

She made her Broadway debut in "The Day the Money Stopped," a short-lived 1958 drama, and her performance won her the Clarence Derwent Award for most promising female.

In 1977, she moved from Los Angeles to her family home in Highlands, where several years later she and Scott Paxton, her third husband, founded the Highlands Studio for the Arts, which offered free arts education classes to children.

They recently resurrected the studio as the Instant Theatre Company, which focused on the performing arts.

Mrs. Paxton also wrote the play "Papa's Angels," an Appalachian Christmas story, which became a book and a TV movie.

-- Los Angeles Times