Collin Wilcox Paxton, the actress who played a White girl who accused a Black man of raping her in the 1962 cinema classic To Kill a Mockingbird, died last Wednesday, Oct. 14 at her home in Highlands, North Carolina after a battle against brain cancer. She was 74.

Collin studied at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio in New York and became an accomplished actress on the Broadway stagge before making her major film debut in the movie adaptation of Harper Lee’s Mockingbird. Wilcox Paxton portrayed Mayella Violet Ewell, the battered daughter of a racist who accused a Black laborer of sexual assault. The scene in which she is cross-examined by Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch is one of the most memorable in the history of film.

Collin Wilcox Paxton retired from showbusiness in the early 1980s.