page_title: Michelle Phillips
section_title: 1994–present: Television and film
hierarchical_section_title: Michelle Phillips / Life and career / 1994–present: Television and film
caption_attribution_description: English: Michelle Phillips, 2002 This file has been extracted from another file&#x3a;&#32; Michelle Phillips.jpg
context_page_description: Michelle Phillips is an American singer, songwriter, actress, and former model. She rose to fame as a vocalist in the musical quartet the Mamas and the Papas in the mid-1960s. Phillips garnered critical acclaim for her voice, which was deemed by Time magazine as the "purest soprano in pop music." She later established a successful career as an actress in film and television in the 1970s. Phillips is the last surviving original member of the Mamas and the Papas.
  A native of Long Beach, California, she spent her early life in Los Angeles and Mexico City, raised by her widowed father. While working as a model in San Francisco, she met and married John Phillips in 1962 and went on to co-found the vocal group the Mamas and the Papas in 1965. The band rose to fame with their popular singles "California Dreamin'" and "Creeque Alley", both of which she co-wrote. They released five studio albums before their dissolution in 1970. With John Phillips, she gave birth to a daughter, singer Chynna Phillips.
context_section_description: She subsequently played Laura Collins in the television drama film No One Would Tell (1996), and also supplied the voice of Raven, a television host, on Ralph Bakshi's HBO animated series Spicy City (1997). Beginning in 1997, she portrayed Abby Malone, mother of Valerie Malone (Tiffani Amber Thiessen) in Fox's Beverly Hills, 90210, and the same year reprised her role of Anne Matheson in television film Knots Landing: Back to the Cul-de-Sac.
  Phillips began dating Steve Zax, a plastic surgeon, in 1999. From 1999 to 2000, she had a guest role on the television series The Magnificent Seven, where she played Maude Standish, the mother of one of the Seven. After the millennium, Phillips continued to occasionally appear in films. She had a supporting role in the comedy Jane White Is Sick & Twisted (2002), the controversial gay-themed drama Harry + Max (2004), and the independent comedy Unbeatable Harold (2006), the latter of which she appeared in as a waitress. Between 2001 and 2004, Phillips also appeared on television in a recurring role on The WB drama 7th Heaven as Lily Jackson, sister of family matriarch Annie Jackson Camden (Catherine Hicks).
  In 2009, Phillips appeared at the annual TV Land Awards for the 30th year celebration of Knots Landing. She also appeared in a minor role in the Norwegian historical film Betrayal, which chronicles the German occupation of Norway.
  In 2017, Zax, Phillips's long-term partner of eighteen years, died. In 2019, Phillips appeared as an interview subject in Andrew Slater's Echo in the Canyon, a documentary on the Laurel Canyon music scene of the 1960s.
caption: Phillips in 2002
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