Peggy Webber, Radio Prolific and Last Link to Welles and Hitchcock, Dies at 100
Peggy Webber, a radio actress who voiced thousands of broadcasts and appeared for both Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock on screen, died on Saturday at an independent living facility in Napa, California. She was 100. Her son, Rob Sinskey, confirmed she died of natural causes, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Webber was the last surviving actor to have worked with both Welles and Hitchcock, two directors who defined mid-century American cinema.
Born Margaret Webber on September 15, 1925, in Laredo, Texas, she was the daughter of a wildcat oil driller. She started working in radio in San Antonio at age 11 and graduated from Tucson High School at 16 in 1942. After her father died, she came to Hollywood with her mother and walked unannounced into CBS, where a page boy named Bob Carroll helped her sign up for an audition.
Radio was Webber's natural medium. She worked on thousands of episodes across shows including The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Story of Dr. Kildare, The Man Called X, and Escape. In 1944 she played Ilsa — the role Ingrid Bergman made famous — in a serialized radio version of Casablanca for NBC's Star Playhouse.
On Jack Webb's 1949 pilot for Dragnet, Webber voiced a role, and she later portrayed Ma Friday, the mother of Webb's Sgt. Joe Friday. The part made her a familiar voice in one of radio and television's most enduring police procedurals.
Her film work placed her in rare company. In Welles's 1948 Macbeth, she played Lady Macduff with a Scottish accent, as Welles wanted. She said she worked on the film for about three years, dubbing voices of other characters, including Jeanette Nolan's Lady Macbeth. In Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (1956) — the only Hitchcock film based on real events — she played Miss Dennerly, an insurance clerk who mistakenly identifies musician Manny Balestrero, played by Henry Fonda, as a robber.
She is also remembered for the 1958 cult horror film The Screaming Skull, in which she played a newlywed. American International Pictures promised a free burial to anyone who died of fright watching the movie.
Webber had left Los Angeles after being evacuated from her home amid fires in January 2025, relocating north to Napa.
She is survived by her son, Rob Sinskey.
