Baby Peggy and Hobart Bosworth in Captain January (1924)
Diana Serra Cary, who under the name Baby Peggy because a silent film star at the age of about 18 months until her father got her blackballed around the age of six, has died at 101.
Unfortunately, most of her movies no longer survive after a vault fire in the late 1920s, but among the few that do is the 1924 version of Captain January, where an orphaned Pegy winds up living with a lighthouse keeper, until it turns out her family was not in fact lost at sea, and understandably want her back. The movie was remade as a vehicle for Shirley Temple, for fairly understandable reasons.
Late in life, Cary was the subject of a documentary, Baby Peggy, the Elephant in the Room, looking at her silent film career and how it messed up the family dynamic to have a kid who was way too young to be legally responsible for everything be the breadwinner. Dad and the grandparents basically squandered the money, and she and Hollywood didn't want each other once she was an adult, so she went into more normal work, meeting artist Robert Cary, which is how she got the Cary name; the Diana and Serra came from her conversion to Catholicism. The documentary is well worth watching as TCM ran it several years back.
This claims to be the surviving footage from Baby Peggy's The Darling of New York:
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1 comment:
At 101 you can't say how terrible but in a why she truly takes the silent era as a living thing with her and that's a very sad passage. She lived an admirable and mind spinningly varied life and was fortunately gifted with a long memory about it. She grew into a very dignified well spoken lady and listening to her in interviews was very enlightening.
That documentary was fascinating as was her autobiography. I've seen a couple of her extant films and she was an adorable kid, not quite the force of personality that Shirley Temple possessed but she held the screen.
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