Celebrity Biographies
Baby Peggy
In the days of silent movies, several child prodigies triumphed, such as Baby Marie Osborne, who made her debut in “The Maid of the Wild” in 1914. In the 1920s, the screen gave two outstanding infants, Jackie Coogan, who filmed ” The Boy” with Charles Chaplin, and Baby Peggy, who earned a million and a half dollars a year, for which he was nicknamed “The Million Dollar Baby”. The last silent film star passed away on February 24, 2020, at the age of 101, in Gustine, California.
Born in San Diego (California), on October 29, 1918, Peggy-Jean Montgomery was the daughter of Jack, a stuntman, whom she went to visit one day with her mother. The girl’s expressiveness impressed Fred Fishback, a director who offered her a contract for Playmates , from 1921. She was so successful that she signed a contract with the production company, Century, to perform a series of shorts alongside Brownie the Wonder Dog, the star canine of the moment
Between 1921 and 1924, Baby Peggy made 150 shorts for the company, including the adaptations of classic stories Hansel and Gretel and Jack and the Beanstalk , and appeared briefly in Cecil B. DeMille ‘s A Dreamer’s Paradise . After moving to Universal, she starred in her biggest hit, Captain Joy , adaptation of a famous novel by Laura E. Richards, where a lighthouse keeper finds a girl among the remains of a shipwreck, so she decides to adopt her. With the advent of sound, she limited herself to appearing occasionally as a secondary, in titles such as The Best of Life , from 1938, together with Ginger Rogers , which meant her farewell to cinema.
From that moment on, Baby Peggy dedicated herself to practicing as a silent film historian, under the name of Diana Serra Cary. She was also the author of several novels, such as “The Drowning Moon,” and became an advocate for the rights of child actors. Despite all the money she had earned during her childhood, mismanagement by her parents had left her in poverty. For many years she went to live in Cuernavaca (Mexico). “Even here sometimes some people find out I was a child star, so they come up and ask me if I’m Baby Jane, I guess because of the movie What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? ” she said in an interview.
Divorced from Gordon Ayres, she was together with Bob Cary from 1954 until his death in 2001. With him she had her only son.