‘Gun Crazy’ vamp Cummins, 92, dies

PEGGY CUMMINS, a Welsh-born stage and film actress who worked just a few years in Hollywood but left behind an indelible performance as the lethal, beret-wearing robber in the noir classic “Gun Crazy,” has died at age 92.

Cummins (photo inset, in the 1950 film), who retired from acting in the early 1960s, died Friday in London at age 92. Her friend Dee Kirkwood said she died of a stroke.

A child star in England, Cummins was not yet 20 when brought to the United States in 1945 by studio boss Darryl Zanuck to play the title role in an adaptation of one of the decade’s raciest novels, “Forever Amber.” The petite blonde was passed over in favor of Linda Darnell, allegedly because she was too young, but Cummins was most certainly of age for “Gun Crazy.”

Initially dismissed by The New York Times as “pretty cheap stuff,” the low-budget “Gun Crazy” was directed by Joseph H. Lewis and secretly co-written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, who devised a tale of sex and violence and of love destroyed by greed.