Peggy Cass - Television and Later Years

Television and Later Years

According to Jack Paar, speaking in retrospect, he felt he may have ruined Cass's Oscar chances by lobbying too much for her on his enormously popular television series The Tonight Show. Cass filled in as announcer for Jack Paar's late night talk show that aired in the 1970s on ABC.

In the 1961–1962 season, Cass and Jack Weston costarred in an ABC sitcom, The Hathaways, along with the Marquis Chimps, a chimpanzee showbiz troupe which served as her "children" on the show. The Hathaways followed the new adventure series Straightaway on ABC, about two young men (John Ashley and Brian Kelly) involved in auto racing, but neither program could compete with CBS's Rawhide starring Clint Eastwood and Eric Fleming.

In 1987, Cass was featured in the early Fox sitcom Women in Prison. Aside from sitcoms, she played the role of H. Sweeney on the NBC afternoon soap opera The Doctors from 1978-1979.

Aside from her work with Jack Paar, her most notable television appearances came as a guest on many game shows, mainly on shows based in New York City. She was a regular panelist on To Tell the Truth from the 1960 through its 1990 revival, appearing in most episodes in the 1960s and 1970s. She was also a panelist on the pilot of the 1960s version of Match Game. On Truth and other series, she often displayed near-encyclopedic knowledge of various topics, and would occasionally question the logic of some of the "facts" presented on the program.

In 1983 she appeared in the New Amsterdam Theatre Company's concert staging of Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash's One Touch of Venus as Mrs. Kramer, opposite Susan Lucci as her daughter, as well as Lee Roy Reams, Ron Raines, and Paige O'Hara as the titular Venus. In the spring of 1991 she participated in a concert staging of Cole Porter's Fifty Million Frenchmen at New York City's French Institute/Alliance Francaise, in the role of Mrs. Gladys Carroll, singing Porter's "The Queen of Terre Haute." (Her performance was repeated on 1991 studio cast recording based on the concert staging, appearing alongside Howard McGillin, Susan Powell, Kim Criswell, and Karen Ziemba.)

She died of heart failure in New York City at the age of 74 at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. She was survived by her husband, Eugene Feeney. They had no children.