Peggy Webber, 1925 – 2026

Radio, movie, and TV actress Peggy Webber, 100, died on Aug. 15. Webber was very busy on radio, appearing on such shows as The Dreft Star Playhouse, Dragnet (as Sgt. Friday’s mother), The Woman in My House, Pete Kelly's Blues, The Damon Runyon Theater, Sears Radio Theater, and others. On TV, she was seen in just about all the anthologies of the 1950s, as well as in such shows as The Whistler, Kings Row, Dragnet, Climax!, Gunsmoke, I Spy, Night Gallery, The Waltons, and Bosom Buddies. Modern audiences know her best as the heroine of The Screaming Skull (1958), which was deftly skewered on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Her other films included Macbeth (as Lady Macduff, to that big ol’ hambone Orson Welles’s Macbeth), The Wrong Man, and The Space Children. Radio World credited Webber with writing some 250 radio plays, as well, many of them for C.A.R.T. (California Artists Radio Theatre), which she founded and ran. Her second husband (from 1983 till his death in 2003) was actor Sean McClory. Webber told writer Kliph Nesteroff that Welles “had me work for him for years dubbing everything in Macbeth. Dubbing the children, dubbing the ladies in waiting, and dubbing the witches’ voices. Jeanette Nolan was Lady Macbeth and I was Lady Macduff, but Jeanette had gone back to Montana with her husband so I had to do her screams and dub things for her. He had me working on it for almost three years.”