Peggy Webber

Margaret "Peggy" Webber was an American actress and producer whose voice and face spanned the golden age of network radio, classic Hollywood, and early television. Born in Laredo, Texas, on September 15, 1925, she was entertaining audiences between reels of silent pictures before her third birthday. After her family moved west, she graduated from Tucson High School in 1942 and began working on radio as a child in San Antonio. Time magazine later nicknamed her gift a "latex voice," noting that in three years she had supplied roughly 150 characters across about 2,500 broadcasts.

Following her father's death and the family's financial collapse, Webber and her mother arrived in Hollywood. On her first day she walked into CBS unannounced. A page boy who would later write for I Love Lucy, Bob Carroll, steered her toward an audition. Hired on the spot after a comic routine of celebrity impressions, she soon shared microphones with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce on The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Lionel Barrymore on Dr. Kildare, Herbert Marshall on The Man Called X, and William Conrad on Escape. She played Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa in a 1944 serialized Casablanca for NBC's Star Playhouse and often juggled multiple soap operas in a single day.

Jack Webb cast her as Ma Friday, the mother of Sergeant Joe Friday, after they worked together on radio dramas. She appeared in the 1949 Dragnet pilot and returned for the television series in the 1950s and again on Dragnet 1967, as well as other Webb productions such as Adam-12 and Emergency! Orson Welles, who already knew her from radio, cast her as a glamorous young Lady Macduff in his 1948 film Macbeth and kept her on the production for years of dubbing, including work on Jeanette Nolan's Lady Macbeth. Alfred Hitchcock used her as Miss Alice Dennerly in The Wrong Man (1956), the insurance clerk whose mistaken identification sets Henry Fonda's true story in motion. In 1958 she starred as newlywed Jenni Whitlock in the cult horror film The Screaming Skull and appeared in The Space Children.

Webber also wrote and directed. In the late 1940s she created the teacher sitcom Oh, Miss Tubbs for experimental Los Angeles television and later said CBS used her scripts as the seed of Our Miss Brooks. Her live literary series Treasures of Literature on KFI-TV earned recognition at the inaugural Emmy ceremonies. Over a long career she wrote and directed hundreds of stage, radio, and television pieces. In 1984 she founded California Artists Radio Theatre (CART), adapting Shakespeare, Bradbury, Joyce, and others with repertory players including Michael York, Roddy McDowall, Ed Asner, and William Shatner. CART productions won medals from public broadcasting and international radio festivals. In 2014 she became the first woman to receive the Norman Corwin Award for Excellence in Audio Theatre.

She married ophthalmologist and later Napa winegrower Robert Marshall Sinskey in 1951; they lived for a time in Japan while he worked for the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission and divorced in 1967. Their three children are Rob, Patricia, and Teresa. Actors Lee Marvin and Paul Fix were godfathers to her first two children. In 1983 she married Irish actor Sean McClory, who died in 2003. Forced to leave Los Angeles during the early 2025 wildfires, she settled in Napa. She turned 100 in September 2025 and died of natural causes on August 15, 2026, at an independent living facility there. Her son Rob Sinskey confirmed the news to The Hollywood Reporter. Survivors include her three children, seven grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

Webber's career bridged media that are often treated as separate worlds. She treated every microphone and camera as a responsibility, telling L.A. Weekly near age 90 that dedication felt like the trust of caring for a child. That ethic, from San Antonio studios to Welles's Macbeth and CART's literary adaptations, made her one of the most durable working actresses of American broadcasting.