Peggy Ann Garner

Early years

Born in Canton, Ohio, Peggy Ann Garner was the daughter of William H. Garner, an attorney, and Virginia Craig Garner. She was pushed by her mother into the limelight and entered in talent quests while still a child. Her parents divorced February 26, 1947.

Garner was a model for still photographers for two years before she began working in films.

Film

By 1938, Garner had made her first film appearance, and over the next few years she appeared in several more films, including Jane Eyre (1943) and The Keys of the Kingdom (1944). She reached the height of her success at the age of 13 in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), winning an Academy Juvenile Award largely for this performance. In the same year she showed she could handle comedy by giving a fine performance in Junior Miss (1945).

Like many child performers, Garner was unable to make a successful transition into adult film roles.

Stage

In 1949, Garner starred in Peg O' My Heart at the Famous Artists Playhouse in Fayetteville, New York. In 1954, she toured with a troupe in several states, performing in The Moon Is Blue. Garner headlined the national tour of the William Inge hit Broadway play "Bus Stop" beginning in 1955. She starred opposite Albert Salmi, who later became her husband. Garner also appeared opposite Dick York in the touring production.

Garner's Broadway credits include Home Is the Hero, First Lady, The Royal Family, and The Man.

Radio and television

In 1950 Garner starred as Esther Smith in the radio comedy Meet Me in St. Louis. The program ran two months on NBC.

Garner was a panelist in two television programs, Leave It to the Girls on ABC and NBC and Who Said That? on NBC. In 1951, she starred in a comedy, Two Girls Named Smith, on ABC.^:1121

In the summer of 1960, a 1958 episode of General Electric Theater, 'The Unfamiliar,' was repeated as an episode of Producer's Choice, and she was cast as Julie in the episode "Stopover" of David McLean's NBC western series, Tate. In 1960 and again in 1962, she was cast in the episodes "Once Around the Circuit" and "Build My Gallows Low", respectively, of the ABC series, Adventures in Paradise, with Gardner McKay.

Later years

After Garner's film career ended, she ventured into stage acting and had some success but also worked as a real estate agent and fleet car executive between acting jobs in order to support herself. In 1978 she surprised film audiences after a decade away from any feature film when she appeared as the pregnant aunt of the bride 'Candice Ruteledge' in the critically acclaimed ensemble Robert Altman film, A Wedding (1978). (Garner had worked with Altman before; he directed a 1961 episode of Bonanza, "The Rival", in which she appeared as a girl being courted by Hoss Cartwright and she appeared in an episode of Combat! (Off Limits in 1963) also directed by Altman .) Her final screen performance was a small part in a 1980 made-for-television feature This Year's Blonde.

Personal life

Garner married singer/game show host Richard Hayes on February 22, 1951, and they divorced in 1953. She married the actor Albert Salmi on May 16, 1956, and they divorced on March 13, 1963. (Another source says that Garner and Salmi were married May 18, 1956.) Garner's final marriage was to Kenyon Foster Brown. After a few years, that marriage, too, ended in divorce. Her only child, Catherine Ann Salmi, died in 1995 at the age of 38 from heart disease.

Death

Garner died from cancer in 1984 at the age of 52 in the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital, Los Angeles.