She began her career on television, appearing in many anthology series during the 1950s, before gaining her breakthrough role in Gun the Man Down (1956) with James Arness and the Western film Rio Bravo (1959) with John Wayne and Dean Martin, for which she received the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year.

During her later career, Dickinson starred in several television movies and miniseries including Hollywood Wives (1985) and Wild Palms (1993), also playing supporting roles in films such as Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1994), Sabrina (1995), Pay It Forward (2000), and Big Bad Love (2001).

[7] Dickinson came in second at a local preliminary for the Miss America contest, and that got the attention of a casting agent, who landed her a spot as one of six showgirls on The Jimmy Durante Show.

She had a role as the duplicitous murder conspirator in a 1964 episode of The Fugitive series with David Janssen and fellow guest star Robert Duvall.

She played an unfaithful wife and bank robber in the 1958 "Wild Blue Yonder" episode of Rod Cameron's syndicated television series State Trooper.

She starred in two Alfred Hitchcock Hour episodes, "Captive Audience" with James Mason on October 18, 1962, and "Thanatos Palace Hotel" with Steven Hill on January 31, 1965.

She had her first starring role in Gun the Man Down (1956) with James Arness, followed by the Sam Fuller cult film China Gate (1957), which depicted an early view of the Vietnam War.

Rejecting the Marilyn Monroe/Jayne Mansfield style of platinum blonde sex symbolism, because she felt it would narrow her acting options, Dickinson initially allowed studios to lighten her naturally brunette hair to honey-blonde.

She appeared early in her career mainly in B-movies or Westerns, including Shoot-Out at Medicine Bend (1957), in which she co-starred with Randolph Scott and James Garner.

[11] These were followed by a political potboiler, A Fever in the Blood (1961); a Belgian Congo-based melodrama, The Sins of Rachel Cade (1961), in which she played a missionary nurse tempted by lust; a scheming woman in Rome Adventure (1962), filmed in Italy; and the title role in Jean Negulesco's Jessica (1962) with Maurice Chevalier, in which she played a young midwife resented by the married women of the town, set in Sicily.

[11] Dickinson's best movie of this era is reputed to be John Boorman's cult classic Point Blank (1967), a crime drama with Lee Marvin, a criminal who is out for revenge after being betrayed by his wife and his best friend.

In 1971, she played a lascivious substitute high-school teacher in the dark comedy Pretty Maids All in a Row which also starred Rock Hudson and Telly Savalas, for director Roger Vadim and writer-producer Gene Roddenberry.

[14] Also in 1971, she portrayed the ambitious wife of Robert Culp in the television movie See the Man Run, and starred alongside Leslie Nielsen in The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler.

In The Outside Man (1972), a French movie shot in Los Angeles, with Jean-Louis Trintignant, directed by Jacques Deray, she plays the beautiful but corrupt wife of a mobster.

In 1973, she co-starred with Roy Thinnes in the supernatural thriller The Norliss Tapes, a television movie produced and directed by Dan Curtis that in later years attained a modest cult following.

[15] One of Dickinson's best-known and most sexually provocative movie roles followed, that of the tawdry widow Wilma McClatchie from the Great Depression romp Big Bad Mama (1974) with William Shatner and Tom Skerritt.

The guest appearance proved to be so popular, NBC offered Dickinson her own television show, which became a ground-breaking weekly series called Police Woman.

In the series, Dickinson played Sergeant "Pepper" Anderson, an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department's Criminal Conspiracy Unit, who often works undercover.

Earlier that year, she had been the first choice to play the character Krystle Carrington on the television series Dynasty, but deciding she wanted to spend more time with her daughter, she turned it down; the role instead went to Linda Evans.

[22] After turning down her own Johnny Carson-produced prospective sitcom, The Angie Dickinson Show, in 1980 after only two episodes had been shot because she did not feel she was funny enough, the private-eye series Cassie & Co. became her unsuccessful attempt at a television comeback.

Dickinson later denied having sung on camera since the two Como specials in an interview with Larry King, which he conducted at the approximate time of her appearance in Duets.

In motion pictures, Dickinson reprised her role as Wilma McClatchie for Big Bad Mama II (1987) and completed the television movie Kojak: Fatal Flaw, in which she was reunited with Telly Savalas.

In the ABC miniseries Wild Palms (1993), produced by Oliver Stone, she was the sadistic, militant sister of Senator Tony Kruetzer, played by Robert Loggia.

[23] In 1995, Sydney Pollack cast her as the prospective mother-in-law of Greg Kinnear in the romantic comedy Sabrina starring Harrison Ford, a remake of the Billy Wilder classic.

She played Burt Reynolds' wife in the thriller The Maddening and the mother of Rick Aiello and Robert Cicchini in the National Lampoon comedy The Don's Analyst.

Having appeared in the original Ocean's 11 (1960) with good friends Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, four decades later, she made a brief cameo in the 2001 remake with George Clooney and Brad Pitt.