Mackenzie Phillips

Laura Mackenzie Phillips was born on November 10, 1959, in Alexandria, Virginia, the daughter of John Phillips of the folk-rock group The Mamas and the Papas and his first wife, Susan Adams. She attended Highland Hall Waldorf School in Northridge, California, where at age 12 she formed a band with three classmates. During one of their performances, casting agent Fred Roos spotted her and arranged an audition for George Lucas's 1973 film American Graffiti. Phillips won the role of Carol Morrison, a young girl accidentally picked up by hot rodding teenager John Milner, played by Paul Le Mat. Because she was 12 during filming and California state law required it, producer Gary Kurtz served as her legal guardian for the duration of the shoot. Phillips was 13 when the film was released.

Her film debut led to a prominent television role: throughout the 1970s, she played teenager Julie Cooper, later Julie Cooper Horvath following the character's marriage, on the long-running sitcom One Day at a Time, earning $50,000 a week. During the show's third season in 1977, she was arrested for disorderly conduct. Drug and alcohol abuse caused her to arrive late and incoherent to rehearsals, and producers ordered a six-week break before ultimately firing her in 1980. Following two near-fatal overdoses, Phillips voluntarily entered Fair Oaks Hospital for treatment. The producers invited her back to the series in 1981, but she relapsed into cocaine use in 1982, collapsed on set the following year, refused a drug test, and was permanently written out of the show.

From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, Phillips toured as a singer with a reformed version of The Mamas and the Papas, billed as The New Mamas and the Papas. Her Broadway career spanned from 1994 to 2005, during which she appeared in productions of Grease and Annie. In 1992, she had entered a nine-month drug rehabilitation program prior to her Broadway work.

In 1999, Phillips joined the Disney Channel series So Weird, co-starring with Cara DeLizia as a fictional rock star named Molly Phillips. She performed original songs on the show written by producers Jon Cooksey and Ann Marie Montade. In 2002, she appeared in the Disney Channel original movie Double Teamed. Her television guest appearances during this period included episodes of ER, Without a Trace, 7th Heaven, Cold Case, and Beverly Hills, 90210.

On March 20, 2011, Phillips received an Honorary Best Actress award at the closing night gala of the Female Eye Film Festival in Toronto for her performance as Sharon in the 2010 independent film Peach Plum Pear. In 2016, she began working as a drug rehabilitation counselor at the Breathe Life Healing Center in West Hollywood, California. The following year, she appeared in the rebooted One Day at a Time as Pam Valentine, a counselor, and reprised the role in two episodes of the series' third season in 2019. In 2018, she appeared as Barbara Denning in episodes of the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black.

On August 27, 2008, Phillips was arrested by Los Angeles Airport Police on charges of cocaine and heroin possession discovered during airport security screening. She pleaded guilty on October 31, 2008, to one felony count of cocaine possession and was sentenced to a drug rehabilitation program, which she successfully completed, resulting in the case's dismissal. She appeared on the third season of Celebrity Rehab, which aired in January and February 2010, and discussed her recovery on the March 17, 2010, episode of The View.

In September 2009, Phillips published her memoir High on Arrival, followed by an hour-long interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show. During the interview, she stated that her father had given her drugs and injected her with cocaine beginning when she was 11 years old, and she described waking from a blackout on the night before her first wedding in 1979 to find herself in a sexual encounter with her father, which she characterized as rape. She also described a subsequent period she termed a form of Stockholm syndrome. The alleged abuse ended after she became pregnant, worried about the child's parentage, and had an abortion her father paid for. John Phillips's third wife, Genevieve Waite, denied the allegations, and his second wife, Michelle Phillips, stated she had every reason to believe the account was untrue. Phillips's half-sister Chynna Phillips, however, stated she believed the claims and said Phillips had first disclosed the relationship to her during a phone call in 1997. Jessica Woods, daughter of Mamas and the Papas member Denny Doherty, stated that her father had told her he knew the truth of the matter and was horrified by what John Phillips had done. Phillips published a second book, Hopeful Healing: Essays on Managing Recovery and Surviving Addiction, in 2017.

Phillips has been married three times: to rock group manager Jeffrey Sessler from 1979 to 1981, to rock guitarist Shane Fontayne from 1986 to 2000, and to Keith Levenson beginning in 2005, a marriage that subsequently ended in divorce. She has one son, Shane Barakan, born in 1987, who is a musician. In a March 2022 interview, Phillips stated that she has dated both men and women.