By 1946, Peggy Webber's voice had already supplied radio with 150 characters across roughly 2,500 broadcasts, a three-year feat that made vocal versatility the signature of her working life. Webber, the actress, writer, director and producer who carried that gift from golden-age radio to Dragnet, Orson Welles's Macbeth, Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man and her own California Artists Radio Theatre, died on August 15, 2026, in Napa, California, at 100.

She was born Margaret Webber in Laredo, Texas, on September 15, 1925. Her father drilled for oil, and the family moved through Texas and Arizona as work and fortune shifted. She performed during silent-film intermissions as a toddler, began radio work in San Antonio at 11 and had her own program in Tucson before graduating from Tucson High School at 16 in 1942. When her father died, she and her mother took a train to Hollywood.

Webber arrived without an appointment or a network connection. She walked into CBS, where page Bob Carroll helped put her name on an audition list. A few days later she built a comic scene out of impressions of performers including Martha Raye, Shirley Temple and ZaSu Pitts. CBS hired her immediately, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Radio rewarded an actor who could disappear into one character after another, and Webber made that ability a profession. In a 1944 serial of Casablanca for NBC's Star Playhouse, she took the role of Ilsa associated with Ingrid Bergman. Her credits accumulated across The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Story of Dr. Kildare, The Man Called X, Escape, Lux Radio Theatre, Fibber McGee and Molly and Have Gun, Will Travel. At the busiest point she juggled several soap operas, racing among studios to make each broadcast.

Jack Webb already knew that range when he invited her to perform in the 1949 radio pilot for Dragnet. Webber became Ma Friday, mother of Webb's Sgt. Joe Friday, but the family connection was only one of the voices she supplied to the franchise. She played numerous characters in the radio series, appeared repeatedly when Dragnet moved to television in 1952 and returned for roles in the 1967 revival. Her work also extended into Webb-produced episodes of Adam-12 and Emergency!

Orson Welles found a screen performer inside the radio actor. Having worked with Webber on the air, he cast her as Lady Macduff in his stark 1948 adaptation of Macbeth. She also joined the eerie chorus as one of the three witches, a second credit confirmed by the AFI Catalog. Webber later recalled that she spent far longer on the production than her visible role suggested, supplying dubbed voices as Welles shaped the film.

She was also working behind the camera while television was still new. Webber wrote and produced the live KFI-TV anthology Treasure of Literature, which brought classic writing to the screen. The series was nominated for Most Popular Television Program at the inaugural Emmy Awards in 1949, placing her creative work among the medium's earliest recognized productions.

Film gave Webber several sharply different places to put a face to the voice. In The Wrong Man in 1956, she played Miss Dennerly, the insurance clerk whose mistaken identification of Henry Fonda's musician propels Hitchcock's story. Two years later she led The Screaming Skull as Jenni Whitlock, a newlywed unsettled by the death of her husband's first wife, and appeared in the science-fiction film The Space Children. On television she ranged through Gunsmoke, I Spy, Night Gallery and The Waltons.

For Webber, performance eventually grew into stewardship. In 1984 she founded the nonprofit California Artists Radio Theatre, known as CART, to bring literary drama back to the microphone and invite young listeners into the spoken word. The first broadcast, an adaptation of Treasure Island on KUSC, prompted 300 calls asking for more, according to California Artists Radio Theatre.

CART became the long second act of Webber's career and the clearest expression of her singular pursuit. She adapted scripts, assembled performers, worked with composers and supervised editing. Its repertory drew actors including Michael York, Samantha Eggar, Roddy McDowall, Ed Asner, William Shatner and David Warner. Productions traveled from Los Angeles stations to public radio and international distribution, allowing Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Ray Bradbury and Norman Corwin to live again as sound.

The work brought honors of its own. CART's Macbeth earned two Gold awards from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and other productions received recognition from radio festivals and public broadcasters. In 2014 Webber became the first woman to receive the Norman Corwin Award for Excellence in Audio Theatre, an honor Radio World described as recognizing a lifetime of contribution to the form.

Approaching 90, she explained the engine behind that output to LA Weekly: "I've had a certain kind of dedication since I was young, and that dedication is what keeps me going." Her son Rob Sinskey, daughters Patricia and Teresa, seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren survived her.

Webber's work still speaks in the surviving Dragnet broadcasts, the severe shadows of Macbeth, the unease of The Screaming Skull and CART's deep catalog of literary productions. Together they preserve the transformation she practiced throughout her career: turning a written line into a living character through breath, timing and the disciplined possibilities of a human voice.