Peggy Cass
Mary Margaret "Peggy" Cass (May 21, 1924 – March 8, 1999) was an American actress, comedian, game show panelist, and announcer.
Peggy Cass
May 21, 1924
March 8, 1999 (aged 74)
- Actress
- comedian
- game show panelist
- announcer
1949–1997
As an actress, Cass is best known for originating the role of Agnes Gooch in the 1956 stage and 1958 film versions of Auntie Mame, for which she won a Tony Award and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. As a television personality, Cass is best known as one of the resident panelists on To Tell the Truth from 1962 to 1968 when hosted by Bud Collyer, 1969 to 1978 when hosted by Garry Moore and his successors Bill Cullen and Joe Garagiola, and 1990 when hosted by Gordon Elliott.
Early life[edit]
Peggy Cass received acting training at HB Studio[1] in New York City and eventually landed the lead role of Billie Dawn in a traveling production of Born Yesterday.
Stage and film[edit]
Cass made her Broadway debut in 1949 with the play Touch and Go. She portrayed Agnes Gooch in Auntie Mame on Broadway and in the film version (1958), a role for which she won the Tony Award for Best Supporting Actress, and received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.[2]
She was cast as "First Woman" in the nine-member ensemble of the 1960 Broadway revue A Thurber Carnival, adapted by James Thurber from his own works.[3] She played several characters throughout the performance, including: the mother in "The Wolf at the Door", the narrator of "The Little Girl and the Wolf", a nameless American tourist (who insisted Macbeth was a murder mystery), Miss Alma Winege in "File and Forget" (who wanted to ship to Mr. Thurber 36 copies of Grandma Was a Nudist, which he did not order), Mrs. Preble in "Mr. Preble Gets Rid of His Wife", Lou in "Take Her Up Tenderly" (who was helping to make old poetry more cheerful), and Walter Mitty's wife.[3]
In 1961, she played Mitzi Stewart in the movie Gidget Goes Hawaiian. In 1964, she starred as First Lady Martha Dinwiddie Butterfield in the mock-biographical novel First Lady: My Thirty Days in the White House. The book, written by Auntie Mame author Patrick Dennis, included photographs by Cris Alexander of Cass, Dody Goodman, Kaye Ballard and others who portrayed the novel's characters.[4]
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Cass succeeded other actresses in Don't Drink the Water (as Marion Hollander) and in Neil Simon's Plaza Suite, and played Mollie Malloy in two revival runs of The Front Page. She also appeared in the 1969 film comedy If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium. In the 1980s, she returned to the stage in 42nd Street and in the 1985 run of The Octette Bridge Club.[2]
Personal life and death[edit]
On March 8, 1999, Cass died of heart failure in New York City at age 74 at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.[9]