Pippa Scott, who played one of abducted daughters alongside Natalie Wood in John Ford’s The Searchers and the secretary of Rosalind Russell’s title character in Auntie Mame, has died. She was 90.
Scott died peacefully May 2 of congenital heart failure at her home in Santa Monica, her daughter Miranda Tollman told The Hollywood Reporter.
Scott’s film résumé also included Gower Champion’s My Six Loves (1963), Richard Lester’s Petulia (1968), Norman Lear’s Cold Turkey (1971) and Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s The Sound of Murder (1982).
On television, the redhead portrayed the wife of a Broadway actor (Brian Aherne) transported back in time in the 1960 Twilight Zone episode “The Trouble With Templeton”; was the wife of a rabbi helping Morey Amsterdam’s character with his very belated bar mitzvah on the 1966 Dick Van Dyke Show installment “Buddy Sorrell: Man and Boy”; and played a nursery school teacher and love interest of Jack Warden’s detective on the 1976 NBC drama Jigsaw John.
Scott’s career got off to a rousing start with she portrayed the ill-fated Lucy Edwards, older sister of Wood’s Debbie Edwards, in the John Wayne-starring The Searchers (1956). And in Auntie Mame, she starred as Pegeen, who winds up falling for Roger Smith’s Patrick Dennis.
Philippa Scott was born in Los Angeles on Nov. 10, 1934. Her mother was stage actress Laura Straub, and her father was Allan Scott, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter behind the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals Top Hat (1935) and Swing Time (1936).
Her uncle, writer-producer Adrian Scott, was blacklisted during the McCarthy era as one of the Hollywood Ten. (She would appear in a 1964 film written by him, The Confession.)
Educated at Radcliffe and UCLA and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, Scott made her Broadway debut in 1956 in Jed Harris’ Child of Fortune, and in 1958, she starred as a teacher who is kidnapped in As Young as We Are.
Scott guest-starred on lots of TV shows, with appearances on Mr. Lucky, The Virginian, Maverick, Thriller, Have Gun — Will Travel, Dr. Kildare, The Fugitive, Wagon Train, Ben Casey, Perry Mason, Wagon Train, F Troop, I Spy, Family Affair, Medical Center, Gunsmoke, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Mission: Impossible, Barnaby Jones, Columbo, The Waltons, Ironside, The Streets of San Francisco, Mannix and Remington Steele.
On stage, she appeared in the New York company of 1959’s Look Back in Anger and 1984’s Isn’t It Romantic and collaborated with John Houseman at UCLA in a 1973 production of Three Sisters in preparation for the start of the Center Theatre Group.
In 1964, Scott married Lee Rich, producer and founding partner of Lorimar Productions, the company behind such acclaimed shows as The Waltons, Dallas, Falcon Crest, Knots Landing, Eight Is Enough and The Blue Knight. They divorced in 1983 but reconnected in 1996 and remained together until his death in 2012.
As a child whose family experienced the consequences of persecution, Scott in 1993 founded The International Monitor Institute, a nonprofit that gathered evidence to assist the prosecution of war crimes in the Balkans, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Congo, Cambodia and Iraq and the systemic use of rape and child soldiers in genocide.
The work of the IMI continues to assist war crime prosecution to this day through the Human Rights department at Duke University.
Scott also founded Linden Productions to further illuminate human rights violations, and her work includes projects commissioned by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and the International Rescue Committee.
In 1998, she produced for PBS’ Frontline the documentary The World’s Most Wanted Man, about the hunt for Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. And in 2006, she produced another doc, King Leopold’s Ghost, about the exploitation of the Congo by the king of Belgium.
After two decades behind the camera, she made her last acting appearance in the indie feature Footprints (2009).
Survivors include her daughters, Miranda and Jessica, and five grandchildren.
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