Peggy Webber in 1955 on an episode of TV's The Whistler.' CBS via Getty Images Peggy Webber, the prolific radio actress who portrayed the mother of Jack Webb’s Joe Friday on the original version of Dragnet before appearing for Orson Welles in Macbeth and Alfred Hitchcock in The Wrong Man, has died. She was 100.
Webber died Saturday of natural causes at an independent living facility in Napa, California, her son, Rob Sinskey, told The Hollywood Reporter. She had moved north from Los Angeles after she had to be evacuated from her home amid the fires in January 2025.
Webber 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.
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She played Ingrid Bergman’s role of Ilsa in a 1944 serialized version of Casablanca for the NBC Radio anthology program Star Playhouse and frequently had “four soap operas going at the same time,” she told historian Kliph Nesteroff in 2023. “I’d be running from one studio to the other, never eating. It was a very wearing thing.”
She had worked with Webb on radio shows including Escape and This Is Your FBI when he asked her to voice a role on his 1949 pilot for Dragnet, his new procedural crime show for NBC Radio. She then portrayed Ma Friday, the mother of Webb’s Sgt. Joe Friday, over the years.
The versatile Webber also had done radio with Welles when he approached her about playing Lady Macduff in his 1948 film adaptation of Macbeth.
“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,’” she recalled. “I did it with a Scottish accent as he wanted and he said, ‘That’s it. That’s it.’ And I got the part.”
She said she worked on the film for about three years, dubbing voices of other characters in the film, including Jeanette Nolan’s Lady Macbeth.
In The Wrong Man (1956), Webber sets the story in motion as Miss Dennerly, an insurance clerk who mistakenly identifies musician Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda) as a man who had robbed her office. The movie is the only Hitchcock film based on real events.
She also is known for her turn as the newlywed who moves into a mansion where her husband’s (John Hudson) first wife died under suspicious circumstances in the cult horror classic The Screaming Skull (1958). American International Pictures promised a free burial to anyone who died of fright watching the movie, a thinly veiled remake of Hitchcock’s Rebecca.
Peggy Webber in 1958’s ‘The Screaming Skull.’ Courtesy Everett Collection The daughter of a wildcat oil driller, Margaret Webber was born on Sept. 15, 1925, in Laredo, Texas. She performed at intermissions during silent movies when she was a toddler and started working on the radio in San Antonio when she was 11.
She and her folks moved to Arizona, where her father, Matthew, had a gold mine, and she graduated at age 16 from Tucson High School (she also had her own radio show in town) in 1942.
With the death of her dad, who had lost all the family’s money, Webber came to Hollywood with her mother, also named Margaret. She walked unannounced into CBS on the day she arrived and met a page boy, future I Love Lucy writer Bob Carroll, who helped her sign up for an audition.
During her tryout a few days later, she did impressions of Martha Raye, Shirley Temple, Stepin Fetchit and others in “a little story about [actress] ZaSu Pitts coming in on a train and not being able to find her hotel, and each person she would stop would be some famous person and I would do them talking to each other.”
She was hired on the spot, and her first gigs would include The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and stepping in as the voice of Bergman on commercials.
Her radio credits also included the lead in The Girl of the Limberlost, work in front of a live audience for the Harold Lloyd Comedy Theatre, lots of shows for writer-producer Norman Corwin and episodes of The Adventures of the Saint, Lux Radio Theatre, The Life of Riley, Strange Wills, Broadway Is My Beat, Fibber McGee and Molly and Have Gun, Will Travel.
“In three years, her latex voice has supplied radio with 150 different characters on some 2,500 broadcasts,” Time magazine noted in a story about her in August 1946.
In the mid-1940s, Webber created a sitcom about a teacher, Oh, Miss Tubbs, for the experimental TV station W6XAO in Los Angeles. After she sent her scripts to CBS in New York, she said the network used them to create a similar radio comedy, Our Miss Brooks. (She wanted to sue, but her attorney, Roy Cohn, told her that if she did, she would never work for CBS again.)
She also wrote and produced Treasure of Literature, bringing classic literary works to life for the L.A. station KFI-TV, and she received a nomination at the inaugural Emmy Awards, held in 1949 at the Hollywood Athletic Club.
When Dragnet made it to television in 1952, Webber guest-starred on several episodes, then appeared on the series after it returned in 1967 and on installments of two other Webb-produced dramas, Adam-12 and Emergency!
Over the years, she also showed up on TV in Kings Row, Cheyenne, M Squad — that series starred Lee Marvin, her next-door neighbor in Rustic Canyon — Climax!, The Millionaire, Gunsmoke, Wanted: Dead or Alive, I Spy, Night Gallery and The Waltons and in films including Her Adventurous Night (1946), John Farrow’s Submarine Command (1952) and The Space Children (1958).
She and Addams Family actor Ted Cassidy owned The New Hope Inn, a restaurant and performance space in Santa Monica, and she ran a theater company with members including Gilligan’s Island star Bob Denver.
Webber also worked on productions for Sears Radio Theatre starting in the late ’70s and in 1984 founded the California Artists Radio Theatre, which revived radio dramas from Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and others and adapted contemporary pieces that she produced and directed. (CART repertory players included Michael York, Samantha Eggar, Roddy McDowall, Ed Asner, William Shatner and David Warner.)
In addition to her son — Marvin was his godfather — survivors include her daughters, Patricia and Teresa (their godfather was actor Paul Fix); grandchildren Ella, Leo, Kaia, Rikki, Aviva, Ian and Whitney; and three great-grandchildren.
Webber was married to Robert Sinskey from 1951 until their 1967 divorce — they moved in 1952 to Japan so he could work as a researcher for the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, and he would become a wine grower and pioneering eye surgeon — and to Irish actor Sean McClory (The Quiet Man, The Californians) from 1983 until his 2003 death.
“I’ve had a certain kind of dedication since I was young,” Webber told L.A. Weekly in 2015 about still working in radio as she was approaching 90, “and that dedication is what keeps me going. It’s like when you have a child. You’ve been given the trust to take care of this creature, and I’ve always felt the same way about the opportunities that have been given to me — it’s a responsibility.”
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