Actress Collin Wilcox died 14 October 2009 of brain cancer. Born 4 February 1935 in Cincinnati, Ohio, her family moved to North Carolina, where she lived the rest of her life, when she was a baby. She will be best remembered for her first film role, as Mayella Ewell, the white woman who accuses Boo Radley (Brock Peters) of rape in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).
Wilcox, who was at times billed as Collin Wilcox-Horne and Collin Wilcox-Paxton, studied at the University of Tennessee, the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago, and the Actors Studio in New York. She made her Broadway debut in 1958, in The Day the Money Stopped, a short-lived drama starring Maxwell Anderson and Brendan Gill. The role won her the Actors’ Equity Association’s Clarence Derwent Award for most promising female performer. The same year came her television debut, in the DuPont Show of the Month performance of “The Member of the Wedding”. As with her first film role, it was perhaps the pinnacle of her career, though her Twilight Zone episode, “Number 12 Looks Just Like You” (1964) is also a memorable one.
Her other genre roles include: American Gothic (1995), Fluke (1995), Jaws 2 (1978), Ghost Story (1972), The Immortal (1970), Great Ghost Tales (1961), and Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1959).
Wilcox was twice divorced. She married her third husband, Scott Paxton (who survives her) in 1979. She is also survived by three children and three grandchildren.