Diana Serra Cary, silent film star known as ‘Baby Peggy,’ 101
During her brief career as a silent-film star, “Baby Peggy” came perilously close to death time and again. The child actor — a toddler when she debuted in 1921 — was thrown from a speeding pickup truck, narrowly escaped a horse trampling and survived near-drownings and incineration, all in the pursuit of making movies in an era with minimal supervision of child welfare.
Born Peggy-Jean Montgomery, she became one of the country’s youngest self-made millionaires by age 4, then suffered a devastating reversal of fortune and fame in her adolescence. In adulthood, she rebounded with a new name, Diana Serra Cary, and became a respected author of books on Hollywood film history. In her autumnal years, at screenings of her few extant films, she found herself embraced as a movie pioneer.
Cary, 101, who was among the last living Hollywood stars of the silent era, died Feb. 24 at her home in Gustine, Calif. Rena Kiehn, a board member of the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont, Calif., confirmed her death but did not cite a cause.
Cary was born into the movies, on Oct. 29, 1918, in San Diego. The family soon settled in Los Angeles. Her father, a former cowboy and park ranger, worked as a stunt double for western star Tom Mix while her mother was a movie extra. Baby Peggy was 19 months old when her mother brought her to Century Studio, where a director paired her with the animal star Brownie the Wonder Dog.
She made dozens of shorts over the next several years, many of which have been lost. Those that survive show a precocious toddler with a gift for physical comedy and mimicry. A still from the short “Peg o’ the Movies” (1923) shows her in a slinky dress and holding a cigarette in an imitation of exotic actress Pola Negri. In other comedies, she parodied film stars Rudolph Valentino and Mary Pickford.
“She was able to do imitations, which is something a really small child isn’t usually capable of,” film historian Kevin Brownlow told the London Independent in 2006. “In one of her films, she plays an old grandfather with a beard.”
“You can see that often the camera is grinding and that she is doing things very naturally which (the filmmakers) are picking up,” Brownlow added, “but she is also perfectly capable of taking direction which — given her age — is quite amazing.”
Doing her own stunt work, she was held underwater in “Sea Shore Shapes” (1921) and positioned under the rods of a train in “Miles of Smiles” (1923). Her father, who attributed her talent and success to “plain old-fashioned obedience,” supervised the shoots.
By 1923, she was signed by a bigger studio, Universal, where she commanded $10,000 a week for feature-length films. The next year, she starred opposite Clara Bow in the comedy “Helen’s Babies.”
“To be taken seriously,” studio chief Carl Laemmle once said, “a child star should make you cry.” To that end, he cast Baby Peggy in “The Darling of New York” (1923), a tear-jerker — with treacherous stunt work — about an immigrant family that survives a tenement fire.