Actress Collin Wilcox was best known for her role as the young white woman whose false claim that she was raped by a black man served as the focal point in the 1963 Oscar-winning film To Kill a Mockingbird. She also starred in the classic Twilight Zone episode “Number Twelve Looks Just Like You” in 1964
Wilcox was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on February 4, 1935, and moved to Highlands, North Carolina, with her family as an infant. She studied acting from an early age and made her debut on the Broadway stage in the late 1950s.
She made her film debut as Mayella Violet Ewell in the 1962 adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, directed by Richard Mulligan and starring Gregory Peck as heroic lawyer Atticus Finch. Wilcox also became a familiar face on television, appearing in episodes of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”, the 1960 Dow Hour of Great Mysteries production of “The Cat and the Canary”, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in two of the more macabre episodes, “The Jar” and “The Monkey’s Paw – A Retelling”, Twilight Zone, Great Ghost Tales, The Immortal, Ghost Story, and American Gothic.
Wilcox starred as Diz Terry, one of three bizarre sisters who have designs on a drifter played by Jack Lord, in the off-beat thriller The Name of the Game Is Kill. She was also featured as Dr. Lureen Elkins in the 1978 sequel Jaws II, and appeared in the 1995 fantasy Fluke, about a man reincarnated as a dog. She also appeared in the telefilms The Lives of Jenny Dolan (1975), The Crying Child (1996), and Carriers (1998).
Wilcox died of brain cancer at her home in Highlands, North Carolina, on October 14, 2009, at age 74.
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