This page uses content from the Peggy Cass biography page on the English version of Wikipedia and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. This list of authors can be seen in the page history. Rotten Tomatoes disclaims any and all warranties as to the accuracy or reliability of the content.

Mary Margaret (Peggy) Cass (May 21, 1924 in Boston, Massachusetts - March 8, 1999 in New York City) was an actress, comedian, game show panelist, and announcer.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she became interested in acting as a member of the drama club at Cambridge Latin School where she went for all of high school without a speaking part. After graduating high school, she would spend most of the 1940s in search of trying to build a career, eventually landing Jan Sterling's role in a traveling production of Born Yesterday before making 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 received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress and won the Tony Award for Best Supporting Actress. Upon achieving acclaim for her role as Agnes Gooch, Cass recounted how she felt a high for the acclaim one night when she approached the theatre where Auntie Mame was playing, but the lights were out in the "C" of her last name lighting her, "Peggy -ass." According to Jack Paar in retrospect, he ruined Cass's Oscar chances by lobbying too much for her on his enormously popular TV show. Peggy Cass later was the announcer for Jack Paar's ABC latenight talkshow that was aired in the 1970s on ABC.

In the early 60s, Peggy starred in an ABC sitcom co-starring the Marquis Chimps, a chimpanzee showbiz troupe. The Hathaways 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 also a regular panelist on the television game show To Tell the Truth from the mid-1950s launch of the show until its 1990 revival, appearing in most episodes in the 1960s and 1970s. On Truth and other series, she was known for her near-encyclopedic knowledge.

She died of heart failure in New York City in 1999 at the age of 74 at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, which may indicate that she was receiving treatment for cancer at the time of her death. She is survived by her widower, Eugene Feeney. They had no children.

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