Peggy Lipton obituary
Actor who won a Golden Globe for The Mod Squad and starred in David Lynch’s TV drama Twin Peaks
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.