By Bianca Sierra
FROM WIKIPEDIA COMMONS
Philippa Scott (November 10, 1934 – May 22, 2025) was an American actress who appeared in film and television since the 1950s.
Scott was born in Los Angeles, California. She was the daughter of actress Laura Straub and screenwriter Allan Scott; an uncle was the blacklisted screenwriter Adrian Scott.
In the 1970s, Scott was a student at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where she pursued a degree in landscape architecture.
Scott attended Radcliffe and UCLA before studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in England. Shortly after her return to the United States, she won a Theatre World Award for her 1956 Broadway debut in Child of Fortune. Scott then quickly signed a contract with Warner Bros. and made her movie debut that same year as Lucy, a niece of John Wayne‘s character in John Ford‘s epic The Searchers.
Scott produced, wrote the screenplay for, and directed King Leopold’s Ghost (2006), a film based on the book of the same name by Adam Hochschild.
Scott married Lee Rich, a founding partner of Lorimar Productions, in 1964. They had two children together before they divorced in 1983, though they maintained a friendship until his death in 2012.
By the 1990s, Scott had become active in human-rights work, such as supporting the Commission of Experts formed under United Nations Security Council Resolution 780 in its research of the “widespread violations of international humanitarian law” committed during the Bosnian genocide.
After two decades behind the camera, she made her last acting appearance in the indie feature Footprints (2009).
Scott died on May 22, 2025, at the age of 90 of congenital heart failure at her home in Santa Monica,
Survivors include her daughters, Miranda and Jessica, and five grandchildren.
Scott died on May 22, 2025, at the age of 90.
