Peter Pagan

Peter MacGregor Pagan (24 July 1921 – 2 June 1999) was an Australian-American actor born in Sydney who built a career spanning stage, film, and television across three countries. One of three sons, he grew up partly in Hay, New South Wales, where his father worked as the town surveyor. He received his formal schooling at Scots College, Bellevue Hill, and at sixteen began studying drama at an amateur group based at Bryant's Playhouse on Forbes Street, Darlinghurst, where he trained for four years. His brother was Brigadier Sir John Ernest Pagan, CMG MBE (1914–1986), federal president of the Liberal Party of Australia and agent-general for New South Wales in London.

Pagan enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force at twenty-one and served more than three years with an armoured division in Western Australia before being discharged on medical grounds in 1945. Shortly after, he was cast in the British-Australian film The Overlanders (1946), which became the role for which he was best known in Australia. Following that production he relocated first to Britain and then to the United States, where he joined the Barter Theatre Company in Virginia at the age of twenty-seven. He became a United States citizen in 1954.

His American television work began in the late 1940s and continued through the 1950s, encompassing appearances on Academy Theatre, The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse, The Web, Studio One in Hollywood, Robert Montgomery Presents, Guiding Light, I Spy, Kraft Theatre, and Playwrights '56, among other programs. On film he appeared in 9½ Weeks (1986).

Pagan's Broadway career extended from 1953 to 1985. His first New York credit was Escapade by Roger MacDougall at the 48th Street Theatre in November 1953, a production that also featured Carroll Baker, Brian Aherne, and Roddy McDowall. The following year he appeared in Portrait of a Lady, William Archibald's adaptation directed by José Quintero, at the ANTA Playhouse alongside Jennifer Jones. In 1956 he was part of the cast of Child of Fortune, Guy Bolton's adaptation of Wings of the Dove directed by Jed Harris with Edmond Purdom, which ran at the Royale Theatre. The musical 13 Daughters, featuring Don Ameche, brought Pagan back to Broadway in March 1961 at the 54th Street Theatre. He then appeared in Noël Coward's The Girl Who Came to Supper at the Broadway Theatre from December 1963 through March 1964, a production starring Florence Henderson and José Ferrer. Hostile Witness by Jack Roffey, with Ray Milland, ran at the Music Box Theatre from February through July 1966. His final Broadway credit was Aren't We All? by Fredrick Lonsdale, which played the Brooks Atkinson Theatre from April to July 1985 with a cast that included Claudette Colbert, Rex Harrison, and Lynn Redgrave.

Away from Broadway, Pagan performed at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts, appearing in The Vinegar Tree with Faye Emerson in 1962 and Boeing Boeing with Van Johnson in 1970. He also appeared in You Never Can Tell by George Bernard Shaw in Philadelphia in 1980. In 1971 he received the Drama Critics' Award for best supporting actor for his role in There's a Girl in My Soup opposite Van Johnson.

In the mid-1970s Pagan stated that he had lost interest in Broadway, attributing its difficulties to the critics. During the late 1970s and into the 1980s he divided his time between New York and Sydney. He died in New York City on 2 June 1999 at the age of seventy-seven.