A native of the movie capital, Mary Mitchel (real name: Mary Dingman) began acting on stage while attending UCLA. Quickly acquiring an agent, she segued into early 1960s TV and movies, among them the Irish-made Dementia 13 (1963), in which she appeared with her real-life husband Bart Patton. (The two had attended UCLA with Dementia 13's 23-year-old writer-director Francis Ford Coppola.) When her acting career later stalled, Mitchel sought jobs behind the scenes, working in different capacities on a variety of motion pictures, many of them Coppola productions (The Godfather (1972), Apocalypse Now (1979), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), and more). Her son Tyler Patton is a set dresser/property master/actor.