Peggy Webber on AllMovie

Many of those viewers who admire her will tell you that Peggy Webber is almost too good an actress for her own good, at least in terms of getting recognition for herself. A chameleon-like presence on-screen, Webber melts into her roles so well that she can often be overlooked by less perceptive viewers, in terms of her range and depth. Webber was the daughter of a wildcat oil driller, born in Laredo, TX, and began her career at age two and a half, performing during intermissions in silent movie theaters in the second half of the 1920s. She broke into radio in 1936, at age 11, and became one of the busier actresses in the medium. It was partly because of her work in radio that Orson Welles chose Webber for the role of Lady McDuff in his film of Macbeth (1948). Film credits were rare and unusual for her, however, so busy was she in the new medium of television, where she became a writer and producer early on and won one of the earlier awards ever given in the small-screen medium, in 1947, for her anthology series Treasures of Literature. Jack Webb used her on the Dragnet radio show and she made the transition to television with him, remaining as part of his stock company right through the late-'60s incarnation of the series. Two of her finest performances were in the episodes "Homicide -- The Student" and "The Joyriders," in which she played a teacher and a harried mother. Webber was still doing voice work in the early twenty first century. She was married for many years to actor Sean McClory, who was just as busy a character actor on television and in movies as she was on radio and television. Her biggest movie role was in Jack Arnold's anti-war science fiction drama The Space Children (1958), as the mother of two children who have come into contact with an alien intelligence.