With her long straight ash blonde hair and soft eyes, Julie symbolized California cool. Peggy played one of TV's first female police officers -- six years before Angie Dickinson's "Police Woman."
Julie wore bell bottoms and beads and the hip clothing of the era, and she looked nothing like the other cops on TV.
Julie and her friends Pete (Michael Cole) and Linc (Clarence Williams III) were the hippest, coolest cops in LA. They might've been the "Fuzz," but they weren't square and they weren't "pigs." The didn't carry guns or badges and they didn't fink on kids.
Julie, the runaway daughter of a San Francisco prostitute mother, had been arrested in LA for vagrancy.
Julie, Pete and Linc were asked to form a "youth squad" and blend in with the counterculture to fight crime. "The Mod Squad" became the first cop show to attract a young audience. The show raised awareness of the issues of the day, like reace, drugs, and the Vietnam War.
Peggy was the last of 17 actresses to audition for the part. "The Mod Squad" producers had practically decided on another actress and only auditioned Peggy as a courtesy. But when producer Aaron Spelling saw her he exclaimed, "Is that a face? Is that a face!" He later said, "One look, even before we saw her on screen and I knew we had our girl." Spelling's partner, Danny Thomas, said, "She had a kind of mystery that got to me."
Peggy brought a laid-back attitude to playing Julie. She told Life magazine in 1971, "I'm in a very, very safe position... I don't take chances. I have my look down. Kind of moping around with my long straight hair and just holding my eyes big.
"I've gotten away with it, and it's fantastic."
Despite Peggy's relaxed acting method, she was nominated for four Golden Globes during the show's five-year run and she won in 1971.
As the wild 1960s era closed out, "The Mod Squad" lost its relevance, and the show was canceled in 1973. Peggy married music producer Quincy Jones who requested that she stay home and raise a family, so she took a hiatus from acting until she returned in 1979 for the TV movie, "The Return of the Mod Squad."
A native of New York City born to Russian Jew parents, Peggy was raised in Nassau County on Long Island. She attended the Professional Children's School in New York which preps aspiring actors and dancers.
Peggy had a successful modeling career before she acted. She told "People" magazine that at age 15 she visited modeling legend Eileen Ford, founder of the Ford Modeling Agency, who told her, "Cut your hair, lose 10 pounds, get rid of your pimples and come back to me."
Peggy followed the advice and became a Ford model. Hampered by a stammering problem, she moved to LA in 1964, and when she took acting classes she discovered that she didn't stutter when she read lines.
The trio -- "One Black, One White, One Blonde" -- infiltrated the counterculture
environment to bring justice to the adults who committed crimes on innocent youngsters. They wore the coolest clothes and projected a hippie persona; they spoke in the slang of the day, using words like "groovy" and solid."
The premise of the show was that the trio were troubled kids, dropouts from straight society, who were placed on probation for their minor crimes.
No. 12
Classic TV Beauties 1960s Countdown
Peggy Lipton as Julie Barnes in "The Mod Squad"
