Pretty as a picture. A film and television ac
tress. This was Rosalind Medlock-Miles.
Born in 1940 in Fort Worth, Medlock-Miles attended I.M. Terrell High School. At Terrell, she was a member of the Mixed Chorus. Medlock-Miles appeared in the senior class production of “June Wedding,” and she was among students recognized for selling the largest number of tickets to the play for her class, according to Terrell’s school newspaper. Leonard’s Department Store awarded her a silver pin her senior year for earning grades B and above and citizenship grades A and above for two consecutive years. Medlock-Miles is a 1957 I.M. Terrell graduate.
Upon completing high school, she earned a bachelor’s degree from Washington D.C.’s Howard University and attended The Julliard School in New York City to pursue an acting career. She later moved to California with sights set on a career as a professional actress.
Her big break came in 1972. Medlock-Miles played Arna Asby, the love interest of lead actor Richard Roundtree, in the action film “Shaft’s Big Score!” directed by Gordon Parks, renowned photographer and composer and America’s first Black writer and director of major Hollywood studio feature films. In 1975 she appeared alongside America’s first female on-screen action heroine, Pam Grier, as fashion model Clovis Boston in the film “Friday Foster.”
Medlock-Miles’ career as an actress includes more than a dozen film and television credits throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s.
She died in 2022 in Los Angeles, California, Medlock-Miles was 82.
