Blaxploitation star Judy Pace dead at 83

Judy Pace, a model and actor known for her roles in 1970s Blaxploitation films, TV's Peyton Place and the groundbreaking telefilm Brian's Song, has died.

She was 83.

The star's daughters Shawn and Julia Pace Mitchell told Deadline that their mother had "died peacefully in her sleep" last week while visiting family in California.

Pace made her onscreen debut in the 1963 Cold War spy film 13 Frightened Girls, launching her career as the first Black woman contracted at Columbia Studios. Throughout the 1960s, she made multiple TV appearances in episodes of Batman, Bewitched, Days of Our Lives, Tarzan, Peyton Place and many more.

She won an NAACP Image Award for Best Actress during her time as Pat Walters on The Young Lawyers from 1969 to 1971.

In the '70s, Pace went on to star in several Blaxploitation films, including Cotton Comes to Harlem in 1970, and The Slams in 1973.

She also portrayed the wife of football legend Gale Sayers in 1971's Brian's Song, which starred James Caan and Bill Dee Williams as the Chicago Bears footballers who were the first interracial roommates in NFL history.

Pace married Ironside actor Don Mitchell in 1972, with whom she shared her two daughters. They divorced in 1984, and she married Major League Baseball player Curt Flood two years later, with whom she lived until his death in 1997.