Peggy Cass

Mary Margaret Cass, known professionally as Peggy Cass, was born on May 21, 1924, in Boston, Massachusetts, and died on March 8, 1999, in New York City, of heart failure at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. An actress, comedian, game show panelist, and announcer, she trained at HB Studio in New York City and built an early stage foundation playing Billie Dawn in a touring production of Born Yesterday before transitioning to Broadway.

Cass made her Broadway debut in 1949 with Touch and Go, launching a stage career that extended through 1985. Her most celebrated Broadway role came in the 1956 production of Auntie Mame, in which she originated the part of Agnes Gooch. The performance earned her both the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play and a Theatre World Award in 1957, and her work in the 1958 film adaptation of the same production brought her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. In 1960, she appeared in A Thurber Carnival, a Broadway revue adapted by James Thurber from his own writings, where she was cast as "First Woman" within a nine-member ensemble. Across the revue's sketches she took on multiple characters, among them the mother in "The Wolf at the Door," the narrator of "The Little Girl and the Wolf," Miss Alma Winege in "File and Forget," Mrs. Preble in "Mr. Preble Gets Rid of His Wife," Lou in "Take Her Up Tenderly," and Walter Mitty's wife, as well as a nameless American tourist who mistook Macbeth for a murder mystery.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Cass joined the casts of Don't Drink the Water, playing Marion Hollander, and Neil Simon's Plaza Suite, succeeding other actresses in both productions. She also appeared in two revival runs of The Front Page as Mollie Malloy. In the 1980s she returned to Broadway, appearing in 42nd Street and starring in the 1985 production of The Octette Bridge Club.

Her film work included the 1958 Auntie Mame adaptation, the 1961 comedy Gidget Goes Hawaiian, in which she played Mitzi Stewart, and the 1969 film If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium. In 1964, she starred as First Lady Martha Dinwiddie Butterfield in First Lady: My Thirty Days in the White House, a mock-biographical novel written by Auntie Mame author Patrick Dennis, with photographs by Cris Alexander featuring Cass alongside Dody Goodman and Kaye Ballard.

On television, Cass became widely recognized as a panelist on To Tell the Truth, appearing regularly from 1960 through the program's 1990 revival across versions hosted by Bud Collyer, Garry Moore, Bill Cullen, Joe Garagiola, and Gordon Elliott. From October 1961 through March 1962, she starred in The Hathaways, a 26-episode ABC sitcom in which she played Elinore Hathaway, a suburban Los Angeles woman who served as mother and booking agent to a trio of performing chimpanzees known as the Marquis Chimps, alongside Jack Weston as her husband Walter. She also appeared on What's My Line? in 1963, made multiple appearances on the Pyramid franchise hosted by Dick Clark and Bill Cullen between 1973 and 1980, appeared on Shoot for the Stars hosted by Geoff Edwards in the late 1970s, and served as a panelist on the pilot of the 1960s version of Match Game. She filled in as announcer on Jack Paar's ABC late-night talk show in the 1970s, played H. Sweeney on the NBC soap opera The Doctors from 1978 to 1979, appeared in the Fox sitcom Women in Prison in 1987, and portrayed civilian secretary Esther Nettleton in the pilot episode of Major Dad on September 17, 1989.

Cass also participated in concert stagings later in her career. In 1983, she appeared in the New Amsterdam Theatre Company's staging of Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash's One Touch of Venus as Mrs. Kramer, alongside Susan Lucci, Lee Roy Reams, Ron Raines, and Paige O'Hara. In the spring of 1991, she took part in a concert staging of Cole Porter's Fifty Million Frenchmen at New York City's French Institute Alliance Française, playing Mrs. Gladys Carroll and performing Porter's "The Queen of Terre Haute."