Dickinson, the second of four daughters, was born Angeline Brown (called “Angie” by family and friends) on September 30, 1931, in Kulm, North Dakota, the daughter of Fredericka (née Hehr) and Leo Henry Brown. Her family was of German descent and she was raised Roman Catholic. Her father was a small-town newspaper publisher and editor, working on the Kulm Messenger and the Edgeley Mail. She fell in love with movies at an early age, as her father was also the projectionist at the town’s only movie theater until it burned down.

In 1942, when she was ten years old, the Brown family moved to Burbank, California, where Angie attended Bellarmine-Jefferson High School, graduating in 1947, at 15 years of age. The previous year, she had won the Sixth Annual Bill of Rights essay contest. She then studied at Immaculate Heart College, Los Angeles, and at Glendale Community College, becoming a business graduate by 1954. Taking a cue from her publisher father, she had intended to be a writer. While a student during 1950–52, she worked as a secretary at Lockheed Air Terminal in Burbank (now Bob Hope Airport) and in a parts factory. She became Angie Dickinson in 1952 when she married football player Gene Dickinson.

In 1956, Dickinson appeared in an episode of The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. The next year she took another small role in Richard Boone’s series Have Gun – Will Travel in the episode “A Matter of Ethics”.

In 1958, she was cast as Laura Meadows in the episode “The Deserters” of an ABC/Warner Bros. Western series, Colt .45, with Wayde Preston. That year, she also played the role of defendant Mrs. Fargo in the Perry Mason episode “The Case of the One-Eyed Witness”.

In 1959, Dickinson’s big-screen breakthrough role came in Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo, in which she played a flirtatious gambler called “Feathers” who becomes attracted to the town sheriff played by Dickinson’s childhood idol John Wayne. The film co-starred Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson and Walter Brennan. When Hawks sold his personal contract with her to a major studio without her knowledge, she was unhappy. Dickinson nonetheless became one of the more prominent leading ladies of the next decade, beginning with The Bramble Bush with Richard Burton. She also took a supporting role in Ocean’s 11 (1960) with friends Sinatra and Martin.

Dickinson went on to create memorable characters in Mike Hammer, Wagon Train and Men into Space. In 1965, she had a recurring role as Carol Tredman on NBC’s Dr. Kildare. She had a memorable turn as the duplicitous murder conspirator in a 1964 episode of The Fugitive series with David Janssen and fellow guest star Robert Duvall. She was at her evil best as 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” on February 1, 1965.

Dickinson kept her married name after her first divorce. She married Burt Bacharach in 1965. They remained a married couple for 15 years, though late in their marriage they had a period of separation during which they dated other people.

A 1966 Esquire cover gained Dickinson additional fame and notoriety, her having posed in nothing but a sweater and a pair of panty hose. The photo became so iconic, that while celebrating the magazine’s 70th anniversary in 2003, the Dickinson pose was recreated for the cover by Britney Spears.

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. In the film, her character seduces a sexually inexperienced student, portrayed by John David Carson, against the backdrop of a series of murders of female students at the same high school. Pretty Maids All In A Row drew hostile critical reviews, and was a box-office failure.

Also in 1971, she portrayed the ambitious wife of Robert Culp in the television movie “See the Man Run”. In The Outside Man (1972), a French movie shot in Los Angeles, with Jean-Louis Trintignant, directed by Jacques Deray, she plays the 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.

Dickinson returned to the small screen in March 1974 for an episode of the critically acclaimed hit anthology series Police Story. 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; it was the first successful dramatic TV series to feature a woman in the title role. At first, Dickinson was reluctant, but when producers told her she could become a household name, she accepted the role. They were right. It co-starred Earl Holliman as Sergeant Bill Crowley, Anderson’s commanding officer, along with Charles Dierkop as investigator Pete Royster and Ed Bernard as investigator Joe Styles.

On occasion during the 1970s, Dickinson took part in the popular Dean Martin Celebrity Roast on television, and herself was the guest of honor on August 2, 1977, roasted by a dais of celebrities that included James Stewart, Orson Welles, and her Police Woman series co-star Earl Holliman.

Dickinson acknowledged her sex symbol role, stating “Are my legs exploited? Well, that’s all I have got to sell”. While observing that “essentially a woman’s job is being a woman”, she disliked repeatedly doing Police Woman scenes “where the phone rings while I’m taking a bath”. In 1978, the same year the show ended, Dickinson reprised her Pepper Anderson character on the television special Ringo, co-starring with Ringo Starr and John Ritter. She also parodied the role in the 1975 and 1979 Bob Hope Christmas specials for NBC. She did the same years later on the 1987 Christmas episode of NBC’s Saturday Night Live.

After nixing 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. She then starred in several television movies, such as One Shoe Makes It Murder (1982), Jealousy (1984), A Touch of Scandal (1984) and Stillwatch (1987). She had a pivotal role in the highly rated miniseries Hollywood Wives (1985), based on a novel by Jackie Collins.

In 1982, and again in 1986, Dickinson appeared in two of Perry Como’s Christmas specials for the ABC television network, in both of which she did something she was not known to have done before: singing. 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.

Dickinson and Police Woman influenced later female-starring, hour-long TV series such as Charlie’s Angels,, Wonder Woman, The Bionic Woman and Cagney & Lacey. In 1987, the Los Angeles Police Department awarded Dickinson an honorary doctorate, which led her to quip, “Now you can call me Doctor Pepper.”

She was presented one of the Golden Boot Awards in 1989 for her contributions to Western cinema.

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. In 1997, she seduced old flame Artie (Rip Torn) in an episode of HBO’s The Larry Sanders Show called “Artie and Angie and Hank and Hercules”.

In 1999, Playboy ranked Dickinson number 42 on their list of the “100 Sexiest Stars of the Century”. In 2002, TV Guide ranked her number 3 on a list of the “50 Sexiest Television Stars of All Time”, behind Diana Rigg and George Clooney (who tied for number 1).

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.

In a 2006 interview with NPR, Dickinson stated that she was a Democrat. She campaigned for Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1960.

She and Bacharach eventually placed her at the Wilson Center, a psychiatric residential treatment facility for adolescents in Faribault, Minnesota, where she remained for nine years. Later, Nikki studied geology at California Lutheran University, but her poor eyesight prevented her from pursuing it as a career. On January 4, 2007, Nikki took her life by suffocation in her apartment in the Ventura County suburb of Thousand Oaks. She was 40. In a joint statement, Dickinson and Bacharach said,

In 2009, Dickinson starred in a Hallmark Channel film, Mending Fences.

In the series, Dickinson played Sergeant Leann “Pepper” Anderson, an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Criminal Conspiracy Unit, who often works undercover. The series became a hit, reaching number one in many countries in which it aired during its first year. It ran for four seasons and Dickinson won a Golden Globe Award, and received Emmy Award nominations for three consecutive years. However, in a 2019 interview, Dickinson said that she regrets having done the series, since the remuneration was inadequate and it left her with little time for other projects.