Judy Pace

Actress Judy Pace Flood was born Judy Pace on June 15, 1942, in Los Angeles, California. Attending Marvin Avenue Elementary School, and Louis Pastuer Junior High School, Pace graduated from Dorsey High School in 1960. Trained in modeling by her sister, Betty, Pace auditioned for the Ebony Fashion Fair and became the youngest model for the show’s 1961 to 1962 national tour.

In 1963 Pace auditioned for Columbia Pictures and was cast in William Castle’s horror film The Candyweb. Pace played a regular role in the 1969 season of Peyton Place and went on to appear in many other shows, including Batman, Bewitched, The Flying Nun, I Spy, The Young Lawyers, The Mod Squad, That’s My Mama, Sanford and Son, What’s Happening?, Good Times, and Sucker Free City.. Cast in Billy Wilder’s The Fortune Cookie in 1966, Pace also played roles in the movies Three in the Attic, The Thomas Crown Affair, and the acclaimed TV movie Brian’s Song. In 1970, Pace won acclaim for her role as Iris in the Ossie Davis directed Cotton Comes to Harlem; in 1973, she played Adelaide in a Las Vegas production of Guys and Dolls.

Pace married Ironsides actor Don Mitchell in 1972 and took time out for civic duties and to raise her two children during the 1980s. Divorced from Mitchell in 1986, Pace then married baseball’s Curt Flood. Since Flood’s death in 1997, Pace acted as a major spokesperson for his role in establishing free agency in professional sports. Pace founded the Kwanza Foundation with fellow actress Nichelle Nichols.

Sources: Brown Sugar: Eighty Years of America's Black Female Superstars; by Donald Bogle; The History Makers: The Nation's Largest African American Video Oral History Collection