The natural shyness and reticence of the actor Peggy Lipton, who has died of cancer aged 72, lent her work an enigmatic, often melancholy quality. A chunk of time spent off-screen between the two TV series for which she was best known – The Mod Squad and Twin Peaks – only added to that sense of mystery.
From 1968 until its cancellation five years later, she was one of the stars of The Mod Squad, a popular TV drama, produced by Aaron Spelling, about a trio of formerly delinquent young hipsters who go undercover as law-enforcement agents – “teenycoppers”, as People magazine put it – in a countercultural milieu; staying true to their hippy ideals, they eschew guns. In 1971, Lipton won a Golden Globe; the charm of her performance as Julie Barnes, the runaway daughter of a sex worker, with her fashionably long, kink-free hair, was undeniable. It outlived the audience’s eventual realisation that the show was square and conformist at heart and somewhat of a wolf in chic clothing.
In 1969, she had met the musician and producer Quincy Jones on a friend’s boat in the Bahamas. They started dating in 1971, then moved in together once Lipton had mastered cooking because, said Jones, “she couldn’t even manage cornflakes, and I don’t believe in a woman who can’t cook”. Following their marriage in 1974, Lipton concentrated on raising their two daughters, putting her career on hold until the late 80s.
Once the couple divorced in 1990, having separated four years earlier, she returned to acting, appearing as Norma Jennings, the wise waitress at the Double R Diner, in David Lynch’s surreal TV crime drama Twin Peaks. She was also featured in the spin-off film, Fire Walk With Me (1992), and in the show’s celebrated and uncompromising third series in 2017.
Lipton was born in New York City, to Harold Lipton, a corporate lawyer, and Rita (nee Benson), an artist, and raised in Lawrence, Long Island. She was a nervous, stammering child. “I felt hurt inside,” she recalled. “I was very guarded. I had a wall around me and a lot of fantasy locked inside. When I was young, I decided the best thing to do was not talk.”
It was her father who facilitated her earliest modelling jobs when she was a teenager, and her mother who persuaded her to take acting lessons; she attended the Professional Children’s School in Manhattan. After the family moved to Los Angeles in 1964, Lipton got work as a cinema usherette before landing small acting roles in TV shows including Bewitched and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. She described herself during that period as a “Topanga Canyon hippy”, a look that appealed to the producers of The Mod Squad. “I enjoyed it, but I didn’t realise how violent it was,” she later said of the show. Instant celebrity brought its own problems. “Fame really drove me into my house. I was very paranoid. I didn’t like going out. I had no idea how to be comfortable with the press. I was very young. It was really hard for me.”
She released several singles and a self-titled 1968 album, and was also one of the co-writers of Frank Sinatra’s 1984 song LA Is My Lady. She dabbled in hallucinogenics and dated Paul McCartney, Terence Stamp, Ryan O’Neal and a girdle-wearing Elvis Presley. “He was a great kisser,” she wrote of Presley in her 2005 autobiography Breathing Out, “but that was about it.”
Though Publishers Weekly dismissed the book as “an old-fashioned kiss-and-tell”, its author was admirably candid about many other areas of her life: her sexual abuse by an uncle, her experiences of drugs and depression, and of raising mixed-race children in a society that could be intolerant. The book ended with her receiving a diagnosis of colon cancer in 2004.
Even after her return to acting she was never prolific. She starred occasionally in films, such as the race-swap comedy True Identity (1991), which was Lenny Henry’s unsuccessful attempt to crack the US, Kevin Costner’s vilified drama The Postman (1997) and the family movie A Dog’s Purpose (2017).
She had recurring TV roles in Popular (2000), co-created by Ryan Murphy, and in the JJ Abrams action series Alias (2004). She appeared in two episodes of the comedy series Angie Tribeca (2016-17) as the mother of the title character, a cop working for the Really Heinous Crimes Unit, played by Lipton’s younger daughter, Rashida Jones.
She is survived by Rashida, and by her elder daughter, Kidada.
• Peggy Lipton (Margaret Ann Lipton), actor, born 30 August 1946; died 11 May 2019
