Actress Peggy Webber died on Saturday, August 15, at the age of 100. The legendary star, who worked for Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock during her career, died of natural causes at an independent living facility in Napa, California.
She had moved there from Los Angeles after she had to be evacuated from her home amid the fires in January 2025. Her son Rob Sinskey confirmed the news to The Hollywood Reporter.
Career spanning seven decades
Her career spanned nearly seven decades across film, radio, television, and stage. Following the death of her father, she moved to Hollywood with her mother and made her radio debut at just 12 years old on San Antonio station WOAI. She graduated from high school in 1942 and just four years later in 1946, Time magazine highlighted her vocal range, noting that in just three years she had voiced 150 different characters across roughly 2,500 broadcasts. That same year she made her big screen debut in Her Adventurous Night.
She caught the eye of enfant terrible Orson Welles when they worked in radio together and he cast her as Lady Macduff in his 1948 adaptation of Macbeth. She later recalled: "He told me, 'Now, I don't want you to do the traditional Lady Macduff. I want you to do a glamorous kind of young person. I want her to be maybe 21 or something like that. I did it with a Scottish accent as he wanted and he said, 'That's it. That's it.' And I got the part."
Notable roles and tributes
Other notable roles include Mrs. Alice Rice in the 1952 film Submarine Command and Miss Dennerly in Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 noir The Wrong Man in which she starred opposite Henry Fonda, which was based on true events. In 1958, she took the lead female role in cult horror classic The Screaming Skull playing a newlywed who moves into a mansion where her husband's (John Hudson) first wife died under suspicious circumstances. American International Pictures promised a free burial to anyone who died of fright watching the movie.
Alongside her screen success she worked on thousands of episodes of radio shows, among them The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce; The Story of Dr. Kildare, starring Lionel Barrymore and Lew Ayres; The Man Called X, starring Herbert Marshall; and Escape, starring William Conrad.
Tributes flooded in for the star as news of her death became public. A user on Facebook penned: " very talented actress. R.I.P. miss Webber you will be missed." Another added: "Oh man....this makes me sad...what a class act she was." A third chimed in: "...The nicest individual in the business. A REAL talent and class act who will be forever in our hearts. Peggy Webber. We LOVE and miss you already." Meanwhile a fourth shared: "May she rest in peace. Peggy Webber made each of her characters - be it the fraught mother of missing daughters, obnoxious booze swilling ex- wife of an ex-con, or the stressed and frustrated single parent of a hard core delinquent - unique, memorable, and integral to the success of Dragnet."
