Peggy Cass
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Mary Margaret (Peggy) Cass (May 21, 1924 in Boston, Massachusetts - March 8, 1999 in New York City) was an actress, comedian, game show panelist, and announcer.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she became interested in acting as a member of the drama club at Cambridge Latin School; however, she attended all of high school without a speaking part. After graduating high school, she spent most of the 1940s in search of an acting career, eventually landing Jan Sterling's role in a traveling production of Born Yesterday, before making her Broadway debut in 1949 with the play Touch and Go.
She was best known for her performance as Agnes Gooch in Auntie Mame on both Broadway and in the film version (1958), a role for which she received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Ms. Cass won the Tony Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Upon achieving acclaim for her role as Agnes Gooch, Cass once recounted how she felt a high one night as she approached the theatre where Auntie Mame was playing; however, the lights were out in the "C" of her last name, which resulted in a billing of "Peggy -ass." According to Jack Paar, in retrospect, he ruined Cass's Oscar chances by lobbying too much for her on his enormously popular The Tonight Show. Cass filled in as announcer for Jack Paar's late night talkshow that aired in the 1970s on ABC.
In the early 1960s, Cass starred in an ABC sitcom, The Hathaways co-starring the Marquis Chimps, a chimpanzee showbiz troupe. The show was not a success. In 1987, she was featured in the early Fox situation comedy Women in Prison. Aside from sitcoms, she played the role of H. Sweeney on the NBC afternoon soap opera The Doctors from 1978 to 1979.
Aside from her work with Jack Parr, her most notable television appearances came as a guest on many game shows, mainly on shows based in New York City. She was also a regular panelist on the television game show To Tell the Truth from the mid-1950s launch of the show until its 1990 revival, appearing in most episodes in the 1960s and 1970s. On Truth and other series, she was known for her near-encyclopedic knowledge.
She died of heart failure in New York City in 1999 at the age of 74 at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. She is survived by her spouse, Eugene Feeney. They had no children.
