Peggy Cass

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Peggy Cass

Peggy Cass (left), with James Thurber and Joan Anderson promoting A Thurber Carnival (1960)

Born

Mary Margaret Cass
May 21, 1924
Boston, Massachusetts

Died

March 8, 1999 (aged 74)
New York City

Years active

1949-1997

Spouse(s)

Eugene Feeney

Awards won
Tony Awards
Best Featured Actress in a Play, 1957

Mary Margaret (Peggy) Cass (May 21, 1924 - March 8, 1999) was an Academy Award-nominated actress, comedian, game show panelist, and announcer.

A native of Boston, Massachusetts, Cass 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.

1 Stage and film
2 Television and later years
3 Awards and nominations
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Stage and film

Cass made 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 Cass won the Tony Award for Best Supporting Actress, and later received an Oscar nomination 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."

Cass was also part of the nine member ensemble cast for the 1960 Broadway revue A Thurber Carnival, adapted by James Thurber from his own works. As "First Woman", according to the script,^[1] she played the mother in "The Wolf at the Door", a woman who insisted Macbeth was a murder mystery, the wife Mr. Preble wanted to get rid of, Miss Alma Winege (who wanted to ship Thurber 36 copies of Grandma Was a Nudist), a woman helping to update old poetry, Walter Mitty's wife, and the narrator of "The Little Girl and The Wolf".

In 1964 she starred as First Lady Martha Dinwiddie Butterfield in the mock-biographical novel First Lady: My Thirty Days in the White House. The book, written by Auntie Mame author Patrick Dennis, included photographs by Cris Alexander of Cass, Dody Goodman, Kaye Ballard and others, portraying the novel's characters.^[2]

In the late 1960s and early 1970s she replaced other actresses in Don't Drink the Water (as Marion Hollander) and in Neil Simon's Plaza Suite; and played Mollie Malloy in two revival runs of The Front Page. She also appeared in the 1969 film comedy If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium. In the 1980s she returned to the stage in 42nd Street and in the brief 1985 run of The Octette Bridge Club.

[edit] Television and later years

According to Jack Paar, speaking in retrospect, he felt he may have ruined Cass's Oscar chances by lobbying too much for her on his enormously popular television series The Tonight Show^{[citation needed]}. Cass filled in as announcer for Jack Paar's late night talk show 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, who were her "children" on the show. 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 a regular panelist on To Tell the Truth from the 1960 through its 1990 revival, appearing in most episodes in the 1960s and 1970s.^[3] She was also a panelist on the pilot of the 1963 version of Match Game. On Truth and other series, she often displayed near-encyclopedic knowledge of various topics, and would occasionally question the logic of some of the "facts" presented on the program.

She died of heart failure in New York City in 1999, aged 74, at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. It was never made clear if she had been receiving treatment for cancer at Sloane-Kettering, which is renowned as a cancer care facility. She was survived by her husband, Eugene Feeney. They had no children.

[edit] Awards and nominations

Winner, 1957 Tony Award®, Best Featured Actress in a Play (for Agnes Gooch in Auntie Mame)
Winner, 1957 Theatre World Award (for Agnes Gooch in Auntie Mame)
Nominee, 1958 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress (for Agnes Gooch in Auntie Mame)