Oscar Profile #410: Peggy Wood

Born February 9, 1892 in Brooklyn, New York, Mary Margaret (Peggy) Wood was the daughter of journalist Eugene Wood and telegraph operator Mary Gardner Wood. A lilting soprano, she began taking singing lessons at the age of 8 and made her stage debut at 18 in a production of Naughty Marietta. She made her Broadway debut the following year in The Three Romeos.

Alternating between musicals and classic dramas, Wood starred in 1917’s Maytime in which she introduced the song “Will You Remember (Sweetheart)”. She made her film debut in 1919’s Almost a Husband but it did not lead to a sustained film career. Married to poet and writer John Weaver in 1924, they had a son David, born in 1927. Both were both members of the famed Algonquin Round Table. One of her most memorable Broadway roles was as Portia in a 1928 Broadway production of The Merchant of Venice. In 1929 Noel Coward wrote Bitter Sweet for her, which she played both in London and New York. That same year she co-stared on screen with Lewis Stone and Leila Hyams in Wonder of Women which was nominated for an Academy Award for writing at the second awards ceremony.

Wood’s next film was 1934’s Handy Andy in which she played Will Rogers’ wife. She appeared in several other films in the 1930s including The Right to Live, A Star Is Born and The Housekeeper’s Daughter. Her husband died of tuberculosis in 1938 at the age of 44.

Wood had two major Broadway successes in the early 1940s in Old Acquaintance opposite Jane Cowl and Blithe Spirit opposite Clifton Webb with Mildred Natwick as the medium. In 1946 she married William H. Walling, an executive in the printing business. She returned to films that same year in The Bride Wore Boots and Magnificent Doll.

Wood had the first of two roles for which she is best remembered, that of the Norwegian-American mother in TV’s Mama based on the 1943 play and the 1948 film. The show ran from 1949 through 1957 during the run of which she was twice nominated for an Emmy, first in 1953 and again in 1957.

Wood finally had a starring role in a film, 1960’s The Story of Ruth in which she was third billed as Naomi. This led to outstanding guest star appearances in two popular TV medical shows, Dr. Kildare and The Nurses in 1963. In 1965 she earned an Oscar nomination for the other role for which she is best remembered as the Mother Abbess in The Sound of Music. In 1969, she appeared in the daytime TV soap opera, One Life to Live several times. Her second husband died in 1973.

A one-time president of The American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), Peggy Wood died following a stroke on March 18, 1978 at the age of 86.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

A STAR IS BORN (1937), directed by William A. Wellman

Wood was not a film star until late in her career, but she was occasionally given an interesting small role in a film in which you wished there was more of her. That was the case with this classic tale of the rise of one star (Janet Gaynor) and the fall of another (Fredric March) in which she played the Central Casting Clerk who briefly befriends Gaynor. It is easily the most frequently screened of all of Wood’s early films. Wood’s fellow Algonquin Round Table partner Dorothy Parker was one of the film’s writers. It was nominated 8 Academy Awards and won 2.

MAGNIFICENT DOLL (1946), directed by Frank Borzage

Wood played Mrs. Payne, the mother of Dolly Madison (Ginger Rogers) and owner of the Washington D.C. boarding house with her husband (Robert Barrat) from which her daughter first falls in love with Aaron Burr (David Niven) and James Madison (Burgess Meredith). The film was a critical and box-office failure with many historical inaccuracies. One was that Wood’s character’s boarding house was in Philadelphia, not Washington, D.C. because that’s where the country’s capital was at the time. Dolly Madison was widower Thomas Jefferson’s White House hostess prior to her stint as first lady to husband James.

MAMA (1949-1957), directed by Various Directors

Set in 1910s San Francisco, this beloved early TV series was based on the book Mama’s Bank Account and the play and film I Remember Mama. Sadly, it isn’t well-known by anyone who didn’t see it in real time because CBS destroyed the kinescope recordings of the live broadcasts. After the show ended in 1956, viewer demands brought it back for one season for which the shows were filmed. It was, in fact, the first TV show brought back by viewer demand. Many fans of the show thought two-time Emmy nominee Wood, a master dialectician, was a Swedish immigrant like her character.

THE STORY OF RUTH (1960), directed by Henry Koster

Wood’s only starring role in a film was as Naomi, the wise mother-in-law of the title character in this biblical epic who leads Ruth to Israel after the death of her husband, Naomi’s son as well as Naomi’s husband and her other son. The role was first offered to Helen Hayes, then to Irene Dunne who had preceded Wood as “Mama” in the 1948 film version of I Remember Mama, but both turned it down. Audiences who had only known Wood from Mama were amazed by what they viewed as a complete transformation into another character in another time.

THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965), directed by Robert Wise

Wood’s iconic Oscar nominated portrayal of the Mother Abbess is almost as beloved as that of “Mama”. Wood herself, at 72, declared that she was too old to reach the high notes in “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” so the song was dubbed by 40-year-old Margery MacKay whose singing voice sounded exactly like the younger Wood. All she had to do was lip sync to the prerecorded song, but she had trouble getting into it, causing director Wise to improvise the scene by having Wood appear in silhouette at the window during the start of the song and turn to face the camera once she got into it and her lips matched the recording perfectly.