RIP Peggy Webber

 

Peggy Webber, Prolific Radio and Film Actress Who Worked With Welles and Hitchcock, Dies at 100

The Eric Alper

August 17, 2026

 

Peggy Webber, an American actress and writer whose career spanned nearly seven decades across film, radio, television, and stage, died on August 15, 2026, in Napa, California, at the age of 100.

Born in Laredo, Texas, the daughter of a wildcat oil driller, Webber began performing almost as soon as she could talk, entertaining theatre audiences during intermissions before the age of three. She made her radio debut at just 12 years old on San Antonio station WOAI and graduated from Tucson High School in 1942, where she was active in dramatics. By 1946, Time magazine was already highlighting her vocal range, noting that in just three years she had voiced 150 different characters across roughly 2,500 broadcasts.

Webber made her film debut in 1946’s ‘Her Adventurous Night’ and went on to appear in Orson Welles’s 1948 adaptation of ‘Macbeth,’ playing Lady Macduff. She later appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Wrong Man’ and the 1952 film ‘Submarine Command.’ On television, she became a familiar presence across dozens of anthology series and Westerns throughout the 1950s and 1960s, including recurring and guest roles on ‘Dragnet,’ ‘Gunsmoke,’ ‘Cheyenne,’ and ‘Wagon Train,’ and later appeared in ‘The Waltons,’ ‘Marcus Welby, M.D.,’ and ‘Night Gallery.’ She lent her voice to characters in ‘The Smurfs’ during the 1980s and continued working into the 2000s, with one of her final credits coming in a 2005 episode of ‘The Inside.’

Beyond performing, Webber built a substantial career as a writer, director, and producer, credited with writing and directing roughly 250 stage plays and radio and television programs over her career. She served as writer and producer for the early television program ‘Treasures of Literature,’ which the Television Academy named the most popular television program of 1949, and in her later decades she founded the California Artists Radio Theatre, continuing to write, direct, and produce hundreds of new audio programs. In 2014, she became the first woman to receive the Norman Corwin Award for Excellence in Audio Theatre, recognizing a lifetime of achievement in the medium.

Webber was married twice, first to Dr. Robert Marshall Sinskey, and later to actor Sean McClory, to whom she was married from 1983 until his death in 2003. She had three children.

Across nearly a century of life and decades spent working across nearly every format American entertainment had to offer, Webber left behind an extraordinary body of work and a reputation as one of radio drama’s most dedicated and versatile champions.

WEBBER, Peggy (Margaret Webber)

Born: 9/15/1925, Laredo, Texas, U.S.A.

Died: 8/15/2026, Napa, California, U.S.A.

 

Peggy Webber’s westerns – actress:

Cheyenne (TV) - 1956 (Ella McIntyre)

Frontier (TV) - 1956 (Meg Horn)

Gunsmoke (TV) - 1957 (Flora Stancil)

Zane Grey Theatre (TV) - 1957 (Norah)

Man Without a Gun (TV) - 1959 (Kate Hutchins)

Trackdown (TV) - 1959 (Nora)

Wagon Train (TV) - 1959 (Millie Collins)

Wanted: Dead or Alive (TV) - 1959 (Minnie Lee Blake)

Law of the Plainsman (TV) - 1960 (Hattie Mullen)

The Rebel (TV) - 1960 (Juanita Flynn)

Laramie (TV) - 1962 (Martha Grundy)

The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (TV) – 1968 (old lady)