Barbara Babcock '60
Week of February 26, 2001

Where does one go after being named Wellesley's Tree Day Mistress at the placid start of the turbulent '60's? In the case of this week's Person of the Week, Barbara Babcock '60, the answers are many and varied - to the reaches of space, on impossible missions, to the American West, the Ewing Ranch, to Hill Street, to ownership of a baseball team, and, along the way, to pick up an Emmy Award, another Emmy nomination and also on scientific missions to Africa and the Amazon River.

Barbara was born this week in 1937 in Fort Riley Kansas. The daughter of an army general and an actress, she was raised in Japan and Europe before coming to Wellesley, where she majored in Italian. She once wrote that "Fifteen minutes after receiving my diploma I said good-bye to family and friends and rushed by taxi to the airport where I boarded a plane for Delaware and my first job as a professional actress. That day gave me a good idea of what life as an actress would be like!".

Since that day Ms. Babcock has performed almost constantly, primarily in television, but with a number of movie and stage roles to her credit. She has become a highly respected character actor and has created a number of memorable roles. Her television credits include several roles in Star Trek, the recurring roles of Liz Craig in Dallas and Dorothy Jennings in Dr. Quinn - Medicine Woman, and roles in episodes of The F.B.I., Cannon, The Law and Harry McGraw, Mannix, Mission Impossible, Perry Mason, China Beach, Taxi, Golden Girls, Murder She Wrote, Cheers, Chicago Hope and many other series. She is perhaps best known for her Emmy Award winning role of Grace Gardner in the pioneering police drama Hill Street Blues.

As Grace Gardner, Ms. Babcock created a character who was smart, independent, aggressive, bawdy, early middle-age (Grace turned 40 during one episode) and oh so sexy. When Hill Street Blues began in 1981, television "cop shows" tended to be simplistic and formulaic. It was often assumed that the audience had a very short attention span and was unable to follow more than one or two subplots and major characters at once. Blues quickly broke that mold with a large ensemble cast, many guest actors, and complex multi-episode plots. At the end of the show's first season it ranked near the bottom of the ratings from prime-time shows, but swept the Emmy nominations and awards, and went on to a 7-season, 146 episode, run. Barbara Babcock as Grace Gardner was an integral part of the show's success and stayed with the show for the first five seasons.

In a 1982 interview, Ms. Babcock said of Grace Gardner "It's the kind of role you couldn't do every week. She's too outrageous. Every time I read a script I say,'That's it. What more can she do?' Then they come up with something new." Following her success in Hill Street Blues Ms. Babcock had another long-runnning recurring role as newspaper editor Dorothy Jennings in Dr. Quinn - Medicine Woman, a role for which she received a second Emmy nomination. Throughout her career Ms. Babcock has advocated the need for more roles for women, and in particular, more roles for independent, intelligent and resourceful women. In Grace Gardner she presented television viewers with a model for the idea that tough and sensual are not mutually exclusive attributes. She was cast in the role of an army colonel in a pilot for a series about West Point and pointed out that there were three generations of West Pointers in her family, and that she had at one time wanted to attend the Academy, but at that time women were not admitted.

Barbara Babcock has led a vigorous life away from acting. An admitted science-phobe while at Wellesley, she has developed deep interests in geology, archaeology and animal behavior. She has accompanied scientific expeditions to Kenya and the Amazon. Together with another actor she received a patent for a shampoo, a venture that required her to study chemistry. She has also been a writer for magazines and newspapers, a photographer, and has continued her education through "extension courses in everything from writing to brain waves". In 1978 she told Wellesley Magazine that "Producers continue to tell me I am too fragile to even play a country doctor. Meanwhile, I hack out trails in the Amazon jungle with a machete ... smile ... and wait!"

And owning the baseball team? That was Barbara Babcock's role in 1973's Bang the Drum Slowly, one of her more than 30 movie roles.

Written by Flick Coleman