Baby Peggy Turns 100 Years Old!
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Happy Birthday, Baby Peggy!
Baby Peggy, the last of the silent film stars, turns 100 years old today!
She was born Peggy-Jean Montgomery on October 29, 1918.
She became one of the biggest child stars of the silent movie era.
Peggy was a millionaire by the time she was six. Soon her career crashed and the Depression hit. She was broke and working as an extra by the time she was a teenager.
One Of The First Child Stars in Films
As Refinery 29 reported:
At the age of 5, Diana Serra Cary, better known as child superstar Baby Peggy, was a self-made multimillionaire, the star of nearly 150 shorts and three feature films. At 7, she was blacklisted, turned away by the very studios who had exploited her, making her work eight-hour days without breaks or time for proper schooling, six days a week.
She is now known as Diana Serra Cary and is the author of several wonderful books about her life as a child star and became a silent film historian.
Diana Serra Cary also self-published her first novel this year at age 99!
The video clip above is from a wonderful 2011 documentary by Turner Classic Movies called Baby Peggy: The Elephant in the Room, which they still run occasionally.
Here is one of her biggest hits, Captain January.
It was remade later into a famous film by Shirley Temple, but this one is also delightful.
Here is an interview with Diana Serra Cary in 2006:
Please check out my thoughts on Every Sunday (1936).
UPDATE: Baby Peggy died on February 24, 2020. She was 101 years old.
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