Advertisement

Baby Peggy obituary

Despite WC Fields’ contention that “children should neither be seen nor heard from – ever again”, cinema audiences have always loved child stars, since the days of Baby Peggy, who has died aged 101.

Until she came along, many children’s roles were filled by established adult actors such as Mary Pickford, who played the title role of a 10-year-old in The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917) at the age of 24.

The year that Baby Peggy made her screen debut, 1921, was when Jackie Coogan made a breakthrough in Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, leading to both mites practically cornering the market for child stars in the 1920s. They made millions of dollars for their parents, most of it squandered on their behalf.

The dark-haired Baby Peggy – who was known as Diana Serra Cary in later years – was a precursor of the blond Shirley Temple, who started in sound movies a decade later. In fact, one of Baby Peggy’s hit features, Captain January (1924), was remade in 1936 as an inferior vehicle for Temple. Like Temple, Baby Peggy did most of her own stunts, impersonated film stars of the day, and became a national institution – she was named the mascot of the 1924 Democratic Convention in New York, and stood on stage waving a flag next to Franklin D Roosevelt.

Baby Peggy was as spunky and funny as Temple, but was never as over-cute or over-sentimental as her successor. The film magazine Photoplay called her “not one of your curled and frilled starlets, but a bobbed, banged, comical child of three, with more humour in one diminutive finger than grown-up luminaries have in 10 manicured digits”.

Baby Peggy later used the name Diana Serra Cary.
Baby Peggy later used the name Diana Serra Cary. Photograph: Jason Merritt/WireImage

She was born Peggy-Jean Montgomery in San Diego, California, and legend has it that she was 19 months old when her mother, Marian, took her to Century Studios in Hollywood on a visit to see her father, Jack Montgomery, a former cowboy, who was working as a stuntman for Tom Mix. “As it turned out, the studio had been looking everywhere for a small child to work with one of their famous contract players, who was a dog, Brownie,” she explained many years later.

“They cast me with Brownie, and that first film [Playmates, 1921] was very successful, so they put me under contract. Father had to quit doubling Mix to shepherd my career. He also knew that even in Hollywood he could never find a job that paid half of what his two-year-old daughter was earning.”

Baby Peggy co-starred with Brownie, the Wonder Dog, in nine shorts, among many other two-reelers (approximately 20 minutes long), before getting her first leading role in a feature, The Darling of New York (1923), only one fragment of which survives. However, among her extant features are Captain January, The Family Secret and Helen’s Babies (all 1924).

In Captain January, Baby Peggy, moving easily from laughter to tears, plays the title role of an orphan girl washed up on shore, discovered by a lighthouse keeper who adopts her; in The Family Secret she was a little miss fix-it. The highlight of Helen’s Babies is the comic interaction between the mischievous child and Edward Everett Horton, a prissy uncle who is looking after her over a weekend. It was her last starring role, and, after a small part in April Fool (1926), she retired, aged eight. In fact, her film career ended when her father fell out with the producer Sol Lesser over her salary and her contract was cancelled.

While under contract to Century and Universal, Baby Peggy was paid up to $1.5m a year. Her mother and father, who handled all of the finances, spent most of it on expensive cars, homes and clothes, setting nothing aside for their daughter’s welfare or education.

By the 30s, the family was living hand to mouth, scraping to meet expenses by working as extras. Baby Peggy had bit parts in a few films and appeared in vaudeville, but suffered various nervous breakdowns, setting a pattern for many other child stars’ ruined lives. After an unhappy first marriage, to an aspiring actor, Gordon Ayres, which lasted 10 years, she married the artist Bob Cary in 1954, and together they started a greetings-card business.

Under the name of Diana Serra Cary (Serra in honour of the 18th-century Catholic missionary Father Junipero Serra in California), she started a second career as a book publisher and author of several books which drew on her childhood experiences. These included Hollywood’s Children: An Inside Account of the Child Star Era (1978), a memoir, What Ever Happened to Baby Peggy? (1996) and Jackie Coogan: The World’s Boy King: A Biography of Hollywood’s Legendary Child Star (2003). She wrote her last book, The Drowning of the Moon, a historical novel, at the age of 99.

Bob died in 2003. She is survived by their son, Mark, and granddaughter, Stephanie.

• Baby Peggy (Peggy-Jean Montgomery/Diana Serra Cary), actor and author, born 29 October 1918; died 24 February 2020