Peggy King

Peggy King died on Sunday 25 October 2026 at the Saunders House assisted living facility in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. She was 96 and had been living with Alzheimer's disease. Her publicist, Alan Eicher, confirmed her death, which was reported the same day by Variety. Coverage recalled her years on The George Gobel Show, her Emmy nomination, her Columbia hits and her role in Zero Hour!. No funeral or memorial arrangements had been announced at the time of the first reports.

Peggy King was born on 16 February 1930 in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, to Floyd Henry King and Mary Margaret Finan. She graduated from Ravenna High School in Ohio and began her career singing on radio in Cleveland while still young.

Her first professional break came as a band singer. She toured with the orchestras of Charlie Spivak, Ralph Flanagan and Ray Anthony, and the national popularity of Flanagan's band encouraged her to move to Hollywood, where she studied singing and dancing.

King made her television debut as a regular on The Mel Torme Show for CBS. In 1952 she signed a contract with MGM, which led to a singing cameo in Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful and a run of commercial jingles for Hunt's tomato sauce. Mitch Miller, head of artists and repertoire at Columbia Records, heard one of the jingles and signed her to a long-term contract.

At Columbia she made two best-selling albums, Wish Upon a Star and Girl Meets Boy, and a string of singles including "Make Yourself Comfortable", which reached the Hit Parade. Arthur Hamilton wrote "Cry Me a River" for her, but Miller would not allow her to record it.

From 1954 to 1957 she was a regular on The George Gobel Show, where Gobel named her "Pretty Perky Peggy King". She received an Emmy nomination for best female singer in 1955, sang "Count Your Blessings" at the 1955 Academy Awards and co-hosted the 1958 Emmy Awards. Billboard and Down Beat both named her Best New Singer of 1955 to 1956.

Her television credits included Bob Hope's Chevy Show, American Bandstand, The Steve Allen Show, The Kraft Music Hall with Milton Berle, What's My Line?, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, The Perry Como Show, The Garry Moore Show and The Jack Benny Program, as well as dramatic roles in Maverick and Dragnet. She sang in Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955), played the stewardess Janet Turner in Zero Hour! (1957), and starred in the television musicals Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates with Tab Hunter and Jack and the Beanstalk with Joel Grey, Celeste Holm and Cyril Ritchard.

Later albums included Lazy Afternoon (1959), Oh What a Memory We Made Tonight (1984) and Peggy King Sings Jerome Kern (1985). She returned to live performance in 2013 with the All-Star Jazz Trio and music director Andrew Kahn, appearing at 54 Below and the Metropolitan Room in New York, and performed in the Philadelphia area, New York and Los Angeles as late as 2014. Her last album, Songs a la King, appeared in 2016.

King married three times. Her first husband was the trumpeter and trombonist Knobby Lee, whom she met in Ralph Flanagan's band; they married in Los Angeles County on 2 February 1953 and divorced in 1956. After ending a two-year engagement to Andre Previn in 1958, she married the publicist Bill Kirkpatrick in 1959. In the early 1960s she married Samuel Rudofker of Philadelphia, who died in 1994; they had two children. She made her home in the Philadelphia area for the rest of her life. She was survived by her daughter, Suzy Rudofker, and son-in-law, Dwain Goforth.

King was among the first stars honoured on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, receiving her star on 8 February 1960 on the 6500 block of Hollywood Boulevard. The Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia inducted her into their Hall of Fame in 2010. She is remembered as a link to the golden age of television variety, and her role in Zero Hour! keeps her on screen for audiences who know the story through its parody, Airplane!.