Actress. Born in Canton, Ohio to William and Virginia Garner. Peggy was cast in several films before gaining fame as Francie Nolan in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in 1945, winning an Academy Juvenile Award largely for this performance. In the same year she showed she could handle comedy by giving a fine performance in Junior Miss. After years of separation and estrangement, her parents were divorced in 1947. At the age of 20, she had moved from Hollywood to New York to try her talents on Broadway. She spent much of the 1950s living and working in New York, studying with the Actors Studio. She appeared on stage with Dorothy Gish in The Man in 1950, A Royal Family in 1951 and Home is the Hero in 1954. She also was in the road company of Bus Stop in 1955. She received Harvard's Hasty Pudding Award for Woman of the Year in 1956. In the summer of 1960, she was cast as Julie in the episode "Stopover" of David McLean's NBC western series, Tate. Also in 1960 and again in 1962, she was cast in the episodes "Once Around the Circuit" and "Build My Gallows Low", respectively, of the ABC series, Adventures in Paradise, with Gardner McKay. Her film career began to fade as she grew older, but she did stage and television work as well as other films. Even while earning her living as a real estate broker in the 1960s and as a fleet automobile sales manager during the 1970s. Peggy married singer/game show host Richard Hayes, and they divorced in 1953. She went on to marry actor Albert Salmi in May, 1956, and they divorced in March, 1963. Her final marriage was to Kenyon Foster Brown. After a few years, that marriage, too, ended in divorce. Her only child, Catherine Ann Salmi, died in 1995 at the age of 38 from heart disease. Peggy died from pancreatic cancer at the age of 52.