Mackenzie Phillips: Movies & Box Office

Mackenzie Phillips (born Laura Mackenzie Phillips on November 10, 1959) is an American actress, singer, and author best known for her breakout role as Carol Morrison in George Lucas’s 1973 classic American Graffiti and as Julie Cooper Horvath on the seminal 1970s sitcom One Day at a Time. Raised in Los Angeles, California, she is the daughter of folk‑rock pioneer John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas and his first wife Susan Adams, and she attended the Highland Hall Waldorf School in Northridge where, at age twelve, she formed a band that caught the eye of casting agent Fred Roos. Her early exposure to the entertainment industry led to a legal guardianship arrangement with producer Gary Kurtz during the filming of American Graffiti, making her one of the youngest performers under a studio‑mandated guardian. After the film’s success, Phillips cemented her television fame when she joined One Day at a Time in 1975, earning a then‑record weekly salary and becoming a cultural touchstone for a generation of viewers. Despite her professional triumphs, Phillips’s career was repeatedly disrupted by substance‑abuse struggles; she faced arrests for disorderly conduct in 1977, multiple overdoses, and eventual dismissal from One Day at a Time in 1982 after refusing a drug test. She entered rehabilitation several times, including a voluntary stint at Fair Oaks Hospital and a nine‑month program in 1992, and later chronicled her recovery in the memoir High on Arrival (2009). In the 1990s she toured with a re‑formed version of The Mamas & the Papas and later returned to acting with roles on Disney Channel’s So Weird, Orange Is the New Black, and a cameo in the rebooted One Day at a Time. Phillips has been married three times— to Jeff Sessler, Michael Barakan, and Keith Levenson— and she is the mother of one son, musician Shane Barakan. In recent years she has worked as a drug‑rehab counselor at the Breathe Life Healing Center in West Hollywood, continuing her advocacy for recovery while remaining a recognizable figure in American popular culture.