Pippa Scott

Pippa Scott, a smart-looking, reddish-haired actress with an unusual first name, seemed bound for a career in the arts from the very start. She was born Philippa Scott in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of actress Laura Straub and playwright/screenwriter Allan Scott, who was responsible for the Ginger Rogers-Fred Astaire films. She is the niece of writer/producer Adrian Scott. Pippa was educated at Radcliffe in Cambridge, the Southern California Institute of Architecture in California and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) in London. Scott's debut was as the lead in Jed Harris' final production on Broadway of "Child of Fortune", based upon Henry James' "Wings of the Dove", on her return to the United States, and she never looked back. Other Broadway appearances followed such as "Miss Lonelyhearts"; "The Apollo Of Bellac"; "Look Back In Anger"; and "Mary, Mary", which she also took on national tour in the United States. Scott acted in such films as John Ford's The Searchers (1956); Auntie Mame (1958); Petulia (1968); and My Six Loves (1963). As she matured, she moved into sporadic character parts but little was seen of her by the late 1970s. She played Dick Van Dyke's wife in the amusing film satire Cold Turkey (1971) and found steady work for a time as Jack Warden's lady pal on the Jigsaw John (1976) television series in the mid-1970s. In 1989, out of nowhere, she produced the film Meet the Hollowheads (1989). Scott was a consistent performer in regional and summer theaters such as John Houseman's Theater Group in Los Angeles and the Williamstown Playhouse in Massachusetts. She performed in scores of episodic television productions in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s (see filmography). Scott was a founding partner of "Lorimar Productions" which, as an Emmy-award winning television company, was the single largest provider of programming to the networks for two and a half decades and produced such classics as The Waltons (1971); Dallas (1978); Falcon Crest (1981); Knots Landing (1979); Eight Is Enough (1977); The Blue Knight (1975); Sybil (1976); and Being There (1979), among many others. Scott also established "Linden Productions" in order to develop and produce a series of documentaries related to conflict and human rights violations. The company produced a 90-minute Frontline (1983) documentary for PBS and Channel 4 in Great Britain about the hunt for the war criminal Radovan Karadzic, titled The Most Dangerous Man in the World (1988), which took a special award at the Berlin Film Festival. Linden produced the ground-breaking introduction shorts for Human Rights Watch's annual fund-raising dinners in London, New York and Los Angeles; a UN-filmed tribute to Judge Richard Goldstone, the Hague's first prosecutor for modern war crimes tribunals on Yugoslavia and Rwanda; the Hilton Foundation's filmed presentation of the International Rescue Committee and an information and promotional piece for reluctant signatories to the United Nation's International Criminal Court. Scott also created the "International Monitor Institute". She was invited in 1992 to develop digital media archives for the war crimes tribunals on Yugoslavia and Rwanda and similar digital collections of other conflicts. The United Nation's Commission of Experts, needing professional help for the film and video collection relating to violations being investigated by the Tribunal, requested Scott's assistance. The International Monitor Institute and its work on the development and collection of vast databases of video and filmed material for these tribunals is a center of film and video archives having to do with global hot spots, conflict and war crimes. They are used by public policy professionals, investigators, journalists, historians, students, forensic anthropologists, documentary filmmakers and others interested in the international political scene, human rights practices, non-proliferation, reconciliation and international law. Show less «