Peggy Cass; Actress Won Tony Award
Peggy Cass, the screechy-voiced comedian who won a Tony Award and an Academy Award nomination for her role as the homely and naive Agnes Gooch in Broadway and film versions of “Auntie Mame,†has died. She was 74.
Cass, also known for myriad appearances on television game shows and her own sitcom, died Monday of heart failure at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York City.
For the record:
12:00 a.m. April 10, 1999 For the Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday April 10, 1999 Home Edition Part A Page 18 Metro Desk 1 inches; 32 words Type of Material: Correction
The Times obituary of actress Peggy Cass on March 11 incorrectly characterized the 1958 movie “Auntie Mame†as a musical. The musical film version of “Auntie Mame,†called “Mame,†starred Lucille Ball and was released in 1974.
The Boston-born Mary Margaret Cass began acting there as a teenager with the Paulist Players and soon moved to New York. She went to Australia with a USO troupe in “The Doughgirls,†made her Broadway debut in “Burlesque†in 1948, and appeared in “Touch and Go†a year later.
But it was “Auntie Mame†that established her as a comedy star in 1956. Cass delighted critics and audiences alike as Gooch, Mame’s unattractive, dimwitted secretary, who finds herself unmarried and pregnant when she takes Mame’s advice to “Live!â€
Cass reprised the role in the 1958 film version of the musical starring Rosalind Russell and Forrest Tucker and earned an Oscar nomination as best supporting actress.
She soon became popular in theater and television, inspiring the Gary Senick song “I’m in Love With Peggy Cass.â€
Her stage work included Broadway and other major productions of “Bernadine,†“Oh, Men, Oh, Women,†“A Thurber Carnival,†“The Front Page,†“Agnes of God,†“Nunsense†and, as recently as 1991, “Light Up the Sky.†Her personal favorite was “Plaza Suite.â€
Cass made her motion picture debut in 1952 in “The Marrying Kind,†and appeared in the 1960s films “Gidget Goes Hawaiian,†“Age of Consent†and “If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium.â€
On the small screen, she became a witty and watchable game show panelist, first on “Keep Talking†from 1958-60 and most durably on “To Tell the Truth†from 1964 to 1980.
“I loved doing it,†she said in 1993. “It was like going to a party.â€
Other game shows featuring Cass were “You’re Putting Me On†and “Cheaters.â€
Cass was a regular player in the comedy team on “The Jack Paar Show†from 1958 to 1962.
In 1961, she starred in her own sitcom, “The Hathaways,†as Elinore Hathaway, the “mother†and booking agent of a family of three performing chimpanzees.
In later years, Cass had a role in the 1987 Fox sitcom “Women in Prison,†provided voices for the PBS animated series “Long Ago and Far Away†from 1988 to 1993, and in 1995 co-starred in the NBC miniseries “Danielle Steel’s ‘Zoya.’ â€
By the mid-1990s, Cass had tired of working. Game and talk shows had lost their appeal, she said, because “now they talk about things like, ‘Why did I marry a woman with two heads?’ â€
But she remained receptive to good offers, commenting in a 1993 Florida interview: “If Steven Spielberg called, I’d be on the next bus.â€
Cass is survived by her second husband, Eugene Feeney.
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