Peggy Webber, the prolific radio actress who portrayed the mother of Jack Webb’s Joe Friday on the original version of Dragnet before appearing for Orson Welles in Macbeth and Alfred Hitchcock in The Wrong Man, has died. She was 100.

Webber died Saturday of natural causes at an independent living facility in Napa, California, her son, Rob Sinskey, told The Hollywood Reporter. She had moved north from Los Angeles after she had to be evacuated from her home amid the fires in January 2025.

Webber worked on thousands of episodes of radio shows, among them The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce; The Story of Dr. Kildare, starring Lionel Barrymore and Lew Ayres; The Man Called X, starring Herbert Marshall; and Escape, starring William Conrad.

She played Ingrid Bergman’s role of Ilsa in a 1944 serialized version of Casablanca for the NBC Radio anthology program Star Playhouse and frequently had “four soap operas going at the same time,” she told historian Kliph Nesteroff in 2023. “I’d be running from one studio to the other, never eating. It was a very wearing thing.”

She had worked with Webb on radio shows including Escape and This Is Your FBI when he asked her to voice a role on his 1949 pilot for Dragnet, his new procedural crime show for NBC Radio. She then portrayed Ma Friday, the mother of Webb’s Sgt. Joe Friday, over the years.

The versatile Webber also had done radio with Welles when he approached her about playing 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.”

She said she worked on the film for about three years, dubbing voices of other characters in the film, including Jeanette Nolan’s Lady Macbeth.

In The Wrong Man (1956), Webber sets the story in motion as Miss Dennerly, an insurance clerk who mistakenly identifies musician Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda) as a man who had robbed her office. The movie is the only Hitchcock film based on real events.

She also is known for her turn as the newlywed who moves into a mansion where her husband’s (John Hudson) first wife died under suspicious circumstances in the cult horror classic The Screaming Skull (1958). American International Pictures promised a free burial to anyone who died of fright watching the movie, a thinly veiled remake of Hitchcock’s Rebecca.

The daughter of a wildcat oil driller, Margaret Webber was born on Sept. 15, 1925, in Laredo, Texas. She performed at intermissions during silent movies when she was a toddler and started working on the radio in San Antonio when she was 11.

She and her folks moved to Arizona, where her father, Matthew, had a gold mine, and she graduated at age 16 from Tucson High School (she also had her own radio show in town) in 1942.

With the death of her dad, who had lost all the family’s money, Webber came to Hollywood with her mother, also named Margaret. She walked unannounced into CBS on the day she arrived and met a page boy, future I Love Lucy writer Bob Carroll, who helped her sign up for an audition.

During her tryout a few days later, she did impressions of Martha Raye, Shirley Temple, Stepin Fetchit and others in “a little story about [actress] ZaSu Pitts coming in on a train and not being able to find her hotel, and each person she would stop would be some famous person and I would do them talking to each other.”

She was hired on the spot, and her first gigs would include The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and stepping in as the voice of Bergman on commercials.

Her radio credits also included the lead in The Girl of the Limberlost, work in front of a live audience for the Harold Lloyd Comedy Theatre, lots of shows for writer-producer Norman Corwin and episodes of The Adventures of the Saint, Lux Radio Theatre, The Life of Riley, Strange Wills, Broadway Is My Beat, Fibber McGee and Molly and Have Gun, Will Travel.

“In three years, her latex voice has supplied radio with 150 different characters on some 2,500 broadcasts,” Time magazine noted in a story about her in August 1946.

In the mid-1940s, Webber created a sitcom about a teacher, Oh, Miss Tubbs, for the experimental TV station W6XAO in Los Angeles. After she sent her scripts to CBS in New York, she said the network used them to create a similar radio comedy, Our Miss Brooks. (She wanted to sue, but her attorney, Roy Cohn, told her that if she did, she would never work for CBS again.)

She also wrote and produced Treasure of Literature, bringing classic literary works to life for the L.A. station KFI-TV, and she received a nomination at the inaugural Emmy Awards, held in 1949 at the Hollywood Athletic Club.

When Dragnet made it to television in 1952, Webber guest-starred on several episodes, then appeared on the series after it returned in 1967 and on installments of two other Webb-produced dramas, Adam-12 and Emergency!

Over the years, she also showed up on TV in Kings Row, Cheyenne, M Squad — that series starred Lee Marvin, her next-door neighbor in Rustic Canyon — Climax!, The Millionaire, Gunsmoke, Wanted: Dead or Alive, I Spy, Night Gallery and The Waltons and in films including Her Adventurous Night (1946), John Farrow’s Submarine Command (1952) and The Space Children (1958).

She and Addams Family actor Ted Cassidy owned The New Hope Inn, a restaurant and performance space in Santa Monica, and she ran a theater company with members including Gilligan’s Island star Bob Denver.

Webber also worked on productions for Sears Radio Theatre starting in the late ’70s and in 1984 founded the California Artists Radio Theatre, which revived radio dramas from Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and others and adapted contemporary pieces that she produced and directed. (CART repertory players included Michael York, Samantha Eggar, Roddy McDowall, Ed Asner, William Shatner and David Warner.)

In addition to her son — Marvin was his godfather — survivors include her daughters, Patricia and Teresa (their godfather was actor Paul Fix); grandchildren Ella, Leo, Kaia, Rikki, Aviva, Ian and Whitney; and three great-grandchildren.

Webber was married to Robert Sinskey from 1951 until their 1967 divorce — they moved in 1952 to Japan so he could work as a researcher for the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, and he would become a wine grower and pioneering eye surgeon —​ and to Irish actor Sean McClory ​(The Quiet Man, The Californians) from 1983 until his 2003 death.

“I’ve had a certain kind of dedication since I was young,” Webber told L.A. Weekly in 2015 about still working in radio as she was approaching 90, “and that dedication is what keeps me going. It’s like when you have a child. You’ve been given the trust to take care of this creature, and I’ve always felt the same way about the opportunities that have been given to me — it’s a responsibility.”

EXCLUSIVE: Independent Artist Group has appointed Blake Levin to the role of Head of Media Finance and Sales.

At IAG, Levin will lead the media finance and content sales business, working with filmmakers, producers, production companies, financiers and rights holders to structure financing, secure distribution, and maximize the value of projects in the domestic and international marketplaces.

Based in IAG’s Los Angeles headquarters, Levin reports to the company’s President, Kyle Loftus. His hiring comes as IAG looks to expand its capabilities across content financing, packaging, sales and worldwide distribution.

With experience spanning representation, development, production, financing and international sales, Levin began his career at WME and later worked at Endeavor Content (now Fifth Season), where he was involved in the development, packaging and international sales of film and television projects.

Most recently, Levin founded Sandhill Road Entertainment, through which he has advised producers, financiers and content creators on packaging, financing and distribution strategies while developing and producing film, television and documentary content.

“Blake represents the kind of experienced, entrepreneurial executive we are continuing to attract to IAG,” said IAG’s CEO Jim Osborne and President Kyle Loftus in a joint statement. “His agency background, combined with the platform he built through Sandhill Road Entertainment, gives him a sophisticated understanding of every stage of the content lifecycle—from development and packaging through financing, sales and distribution — and he will be an enormous asset to our clients and the continued growth of IAG.”

Levin said: “IAG has built an entrepreneurial and highly collaborative culture with an exceptional roster of artists, creators and production companies. I’m thrilled to run this division alongside a team that values collaboration and creativity. Our business continues to evolve rapidly, and the best projects rarely follow a conventional path. Our goal is to help bold voices and ideas find the right partners and reach audiences around the world.”

Pluribus creator and executive producer Vince Gilligan learned a big lesson about saying too much about a series when he answered questions about the meaning of his first big hit, Breaking Bad. “I was always talking about ‘this is what this means. No, you’re wrong and don’t interpret it that way.’ And that was a mistake on my part. I want the people who watched the show to tell me what it means. I really think they know better than I do,” he says now.

“We make the show. I can’t see the forest for the trees when we’re making it, but I like the idea of other people interpreting it for me. I think everyone else’s interpretation of this thing is way more interesting than mine is.” And indeed it is a rich concept that has viewers wondering if it is saying profound things about the effects of the pandemic, AI, immigration and other topics of the day. The fact is Gilligan came up with the idea 10 years ago and has been refining it in his head ever since. He welcomes every interpretation.

Gilligan joined his cast for a conversation Sunday at Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees Studio to talk about Pluribus, his latest series following massive hits Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. This one is a genre-breaking science fiction drama in which a global virus has turned almost all human beings into a hive mentality of shared bliss. A few have somehow missed catching it and are now fighting back, notably Carol (Rhea Seehorn), a novelist who must try to save the world from this newfound happiness.

Gilligan and Seehorn participated in the Contenders discussion with co-stars Karolina Wydra, who plays Zosia, Carlos-Manuel Vesga as Manousos, and guest star Jeff Hiller as Larry. All have received Emmy nominations along with the series, which landed 18 nominations overall including for Gilligan in the writing and directing categories.

Watch their conversation below and scroll down for photos from the event.

Originally, Gilligan’s thought was for the Carol role to be a man, but when he started actually writing it was Seehorn he had in mind. For Seehorn, who had an acclaimed supporting role in Better Call Saul, and for whom this is her first starring role on a series, it is especially sweet, even being called by her character name on the street.

“Yeah, it is my first lead role, and it’s been so much fun. And yes, I got a couple of ‘Hello, Carol’s now and then in grocery stores, which is pretty funny, but the fans have actually been amazing,” she said. “And the fact that the show, including what Vince is saying, that it is open to interpretation and has engendered really nuanced conversations and these amazing wild swings that take some tone from having comedy to having deep psychological drama and questions and stuff, just makes people actually come up to me with really interesting opinions about the show, and they feel very invested and they feel very invested in the character. And I feel very lucky that it is something that we made, that we’ve made to the best of our abilities, and so we were all so proud of it.”

Wydra felt an immediate connection with Seehorn’s Carol. “What I love about it is that Zosia is there to provide for Carol everything that she needs. I’m there to protect you. I’m there to make you feel seen and good. And it was great to play someone that doesn’t have the full spectrum of emotion, someone that you know is joyous, unflappable, and you know have these beautiful scenes with you where you have these feelings,” she said.

Rhea Seehorn

Anthony Avellano for Deadline

Vince Gilligan

Anthony Avellano for Deadline

Karolina Wydra

Anthony Avellano for Deadline

Carlos-Manuel Vesga

Anthony Avellano for Deadline

Vesga, the first male Colombian actor to be nominated for an Emmy, plays a man, like Carol, who has not been infected and feels very much alone. It is something he has felt in his own way being someone from another country suddenly in America and playing a role like this. “I would love to say that I was dreaming about this, but I wouldn’t even allow myself to dream this. It wasn’t a possibility. I’m just saying that this doesn’t happen to a Colombian actor, and it did,” he said, praising on Gilligan making it happen for him.

Jeff Hiller, who won an Emmy last year for Somebody, Somewhere and co-stars in another big nominated show this season Widow’s Bay, also from Apple TV, was to say the least surprised by his Guest Male Actor in a Drama Series Emmy nomination for Pluribus since the role doesn’t last more than seven minutes of screen time, and he says he really had no idea what it was about when called in to play it. He gives much credit to Seehorn and some behind the scenes artisans for being so generous.

“Well, it’s always hard to be a guest star, and it’s especially hard to be a guest star on a show that has this complicated of a premise. And the only way that it worked is because Rhea gave up a Sunday, a very precious day off on this very grueling shoot, invited me over, and we rehearsed for, like, hours.” he said, also noting other women on the team who helped that dya. “It was the gift of of those three women on a Sunday afternoon that made the performance.”