Actress Who Worked With Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles Dead at 100: RIP to Peggy Webber

Peggy Webber, the prolific radio actress who played the mother of Jack Webb’s Joe Friday on the original Dragnet and later appeared in films directed by Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, has died. She was 100.

Webber died on Aug. 15 of natural causes at an independent living facility in Napa, California, her son, Rob Sinskey, told The Hollywood Reporter.

She moved to Northern California after being evacuated from her Los Angeles home during the January 2025 wildfires.

Webber built an extensive career in radio, appearing in thousands of episodes across some of the medium’s best-known programs.

Her credits included The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, The Story of Dr. Kildare with Lionel Barrymore and Lew Ayres, The Man Called X with Herbert Marshall and Escape with William Conrad.

She also portrayed Ilsa, the role made famous by Ingrid Bergman, in a 1944 serialized radio adaptation of Casablanca for NBC’s Star Playhouse.

The demanding schedule was not always easy. Webber recalled working on multiple programs at once during a 2023 interview with radio historian Kliph Nesteroff.

“I’d be running from one studio to the other, never eating. It was a very wearing thing,” she said.

Webber’s connection with Webb eventually led to one of her most recognizable roles. After working with him on radio programs including Escape and This Is Your FBI, she was cast in his 1949 Dragnetpilot for NBC Radio. She went on to portray Ma Friday, the mother of Webb’s Sgt. Joe Friday, throughout the series.

Her work also brought her into the orbit of Welles, who cast her as Lady Macduff in his 1948 film adaptation of Macbeth.

“He told me, ‘Now, I don’t want you to do the traditional Lady Macduff. I want you to do a glamorous kind of young person. I want her to be maybe 21 or something like that,’” she recalled. “I did it with a Scottish accent as he wanted and he said, ‘That’s it. That’s it.’ And I got the part.”

Webber said she spent about three years working on Macbeth, including dubbing voices for other characters.

She later appeared in Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man in 1956, playing an insurance clerk whose mistaken identification helps set the story in motion for Henry Fonda’s character. The film was based on real events.

Webber also starred in the 1958 horror film The Screaming Skull, playing a newlywed who moves into a mansion where her husband’s first wife died under suspicious circumstances.

Born Margaret Webber on Sept. 15, 1925, in Laredo, Texas, she began performing as a child and started working in radio in San Antonio at age 11.

She later moved to Arizona with her family and graduated from Tucson High School at 16.

After her father’s death, Webber moved to Hollywood with her mother. On her first day in town, she walked into CBS without an appointment and eventually secured an audition with help from a page who would later become I Love Lucy writer Bob Carroll.