who played peggy on the andy griffith show

#WHO PLAYED PEGGY ON THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW MOVIE#
#WHO PLAYED PEGGY ON THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW SERIES#

#WHO PLAYED PEGGY ON THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW SERIES#

Though her comedy ROOM FOR ONE MORE never became a huge hit, she landed a steady series of guest-starring roles on popular prime-time shows, including THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW, PERRY MASON, THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR and BEN CASEY. McCay eventually moved to Los Angeles, where she was put under contract by Warner Brothers. From 1951-55, she had her first daytime gig, playing Vanessa in the New York-based LOVE OF LIFE. Immediately after graduating from college, she won a role in a Kraft Theater Show soon after, she became the youngest person to be a part of the Margo Jones Repertory Theater. While she was in high school, she performed in several plays, including Omnibus and Playhouse 90.Īfter high school, she attended Barnard College of Columbia University, where she continued to study theater. She made two on-screen appearances in the 1980s, but otherwise had been unseen in the 20 years before her death in 1997.Growing up in New York City gave Peggy McCay plenty of opportunities to pursue her interest in acting. After that, her appearances became much more sporadic, and it was said that Moore was living a post-hippie lifestyle on various communes when she wasn't working in episodes of Kung Fu or making a rare feature film appearance in Robert Wise's The Hindenburg (1975), where she was almost lost amid the all-star cast of the gargantuan disaster movie. She was still extremely busy, however, appearing in Robert Altman's 1968 space-exploration feature film drama Countdown, as well as sitcoms (The Governor and J.J.) and television dramas (Judd for the Defense) right into 1970. By the end of the 1960s, Moore's personal life had begun falling apart, and she lost custody of both children owing to substance abuse problems. By 1967, however, the marriage - which produced two children, Tatum O'Neal and Griffin O'Neal - had ended in divorce. Moore kept very busy during this period, working in episodes of everything from My Three Sons to Gunsmoke, and she even turned up on Peyton Place in 1966.

Moore married actor Ryan O'Neal that same year, and became much better known in the press from that personal union than for any of her screen work O'Neal's sudden rise to fame with the advent of the series Peyton Place in 1964 made them one of the most visible (and attractive) young couples in Hollywood during the mid-'60s. It did allow her to show off her range in comedy as well as drama, however, and even to sing the folk song 'Down in the Valley' in one show, and it became the screen role for which she may be best remembered.

She did work in some better quality dramatic series, such as Route 66 and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, but her best career opportunity seems to have come along in 1963, when Moore was cast as Peggy MacMillan, the new love interest for Sheriff Andy Taylor ( Andy Griffith) on The Andy Griffith Show, but that proved to be only a four-episode gig. She took what there was in feature film work, the dubious (Monster on the Campus) and the good ( The Last Angry Man), but following Walk on the Wild Side, her best opportunities came from Elvis Presley ( Follow That Dream), and the Disney organization, which memorably cast her as femme fatale Desiree de la Roche in Son of Flubber (1963). As a result, as beautiful as she was, Moore spent most of her career on the small screen, on anthology shows such as Lux Video Theater, or doing one-shot appearances on The Rifleman, Riverboat, Adventures in Paradise, and the countless other dramatic series that filled the home screen.

#WHO PLAYED PEGGY ON THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW MOVIE#

Born Dorothy Cook in Americus, GA, in 1934, she didn't begin her screen acting career until the mid-'50s, a point where television had started to overwhelm the movie business, leaving no more room for studios to develop young talent. But despite those two stand-out credits and movie-star looks, she had the misfortune to have come along too late to make a lasting impression. And across that time she got to play a couple of highly visible parts in important movies: she was the daughter of the murder victim whose killing starts the action in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958) and was the learning-disabled prostitute in Edward Dmytryk's A Walk on the Wild Side (1962). Georgia-born Joanna Moore spent two decades of her life in acting, a profession that she claimed never to have really wished to pursue.

Who played peggy on the andy griffith show