Rant #2,372: Peggy Do

We lost an icon over the weekend, a woman who defined her generation as the result of one, single role that she had as an actress 50 years ago.

Peggy Lipton, one of the stars of the groundbreaking cop drama "The Mod Squad," passed away from colon cancer. The eternally youthful Lipton was just 72 when she died.

The actress, born in the Bronx and raised in the Jewish faith in Lawrence, Long Island, came to Hollywood's notice in the mid 1960s as a model, and later appeared on several TV shows in small roles, including on "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour."

It took her a few years to establish herself as an actress, and when ABC, the nation's third network at the time, was looking for another "quirky" show to accent its burgeoning schedule, it decided on doing something a bit different as a crime drama, breaking away from the norm of shows like "The F.B.I.," a show that Lipton had guest starred on.

Looking at the times we lived in in the late 1960s, ABC decided to go with a crime/cop drama that would reflect those times, and "The Mod Squad" was developed.

The show features three very distinct characters as leads: the spoiled rich kid who rebelled against society (Michael Cole); the revolutionary black guy (Clarence Williams III); and the waif-like hippie (Lipton), meshed together as an undercover crime-fighting unit in Los Angeles in order to save their hides in the California penal system.

Using the tag line "One black, one white, one blond," the show came to the ABC schedule in 1968 and was an immediate hit, and Lipton, who played the most vulnerable of the characters, was its breakout star.

She looked the hippie part in her Julie Barnes role, with her long straight hair and her soft spoken attitude on the show, and of the three young actors, she was the one who made the biggest impression with viewers.

Lipton tried to catapult her newfound stardom with a singing career, which really never materialized even though she appeared on just about every TV variety show around as a singer, but during this period, she met Quincy Jones, the writer of the show's theme song.

They eventually married, smashing a taboo even then with a white, Jewish girl marrying an older black man, but the marriage lasted, and produced two children.

Lipton continued on "The Mod Squad," and earned several Golden Globe nominations. The show ended in 1973 and Lipton pretty much faded away from acting to raise her children.

Her marriage to Jones ended in 1990, and she continued to be a mere footnote on the 1960s, until re-emerging in the late 1980s as one of the stars of the short-lived "Twin Peaks" TV series.

For the past 30 or so years, she appeared in a few TV shows here and there, and had continued to re-emerge as part of her daughter Rashida's Jones' humorous Verizon TV spots (that is Peggy's back in the photo).

Lipton revealed that she had been battling colon cancer since the early 2000s, and succumbed to the disease this past weekend.

To most of us of the baby boomer generation, no matter what Lipton ever did, she will always be the female part of "The Mod Squad," the willowy, good looking gal who wore snazzy mod clothes and basically stayed in the background while Williams III and Cole got in the punches.

She was certainly an icon to our generation, and with the show in reruns off and on in the past few years, and the entire series and reunion movie widely available on video, her acting life is cemented forever.

We all loved Peggy, and to us, she will always be the eternal flame of that very popular show.