Colin Wilcox attended UT from summer quarter 1953 to spring quarter 1956. She spent her early years in Highlands, North Carolina, where her parents and some of their friends founded the Highlands Community Theatre (now Highlands Playhouse) in 1939. Her first speaking role was in the HCT production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.
She was a resident ingenue at Carousel Theatre while she was in high school in Knoxville. While at UT, she appeared in plays at Carousel as well as in university theater productions at the Bijou Theatre. She also studied at Goodman Memorial School of Theatre in Chicago; the Compass in Chicago; and (in 1957) at the Actor’s Studio in New York. Her first Broadway role was in The Day the Money Stopped. For that role, she won the Clarence Derwent Award for Best Supporting Actress, on or off Broadway, in 1958. Other Broadway plays in which she appeared include Crazy October, Strange Interlude, Under the Yum Yum Tree, La Bonne Soup, The Family Way, and Look, We’ve Come Through. Off-Broadway roles have included Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real and Suddenly Last Summer.
Her first movie role was as Mayella Violet Ewell in To Kill a Mockingbird. Other film roles include Jaws 2; A Rainy Day; The Baby Maker; September 30, 1955; The Name of the Game is Kill; Catch 22; The Revolutionary; Jump; Marie; Journey of August King; Fluke; Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil; and The Chester Story. Among her many television roles are ones in Carriers, The Crying Child, American Gothic and Proud Heart, Christy, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Quincey, The Waltons, The Streets of San Francisco, Dr. Kildare, Little House on the Prairie, Twilight Zone, and Ironsides.
In the late 1970s, she returned to Highlands, North Carolina, where she and her husband founded the multi-arts center The Highlands Studio for the Arts.