Peggy King, Hall of Fame actor and top-selling Rat Pack era singer, has died at 96
In 2015, she said she wanted to be remembered “as an actress who sings. I’d like to think someone would read that.”
Peggy King, 96, formerly of Philadelphia, Hall of Fame TV and film actor, top-selling Rat Pack era singer and entertainer, and popular vocalist with the Philadelphia-based All-Star Jazz Trio, died Sunday, Oct. 25, of complications from Alzheimer’s disease at Saunders House assisted living center in Wynnewood.
Celebrated for her soaring soprano voice, girl-next-door appeal, photographic memory, and collegial nature, Miss King was discovered singing for a Cleveland radio station in 1950 by bandleader Charlie Spivak. Over the next 10 years, she toured with Spivak and other big bands, recorded hit singles and top-selling albums with Columbia Records, and sang with Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. She co-hosted The George Gobel Show on TV, and earned film roles in The Bad and the Beautiful, Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, and Zero Hour!
She was nominated for an Emmy Award as best female singer on TV in 1955 and named best new singer in 1956 by DownBeat and Billboard magazines. On Oct. 22, 1955, she was on the cover of TV Guide.
In 1960, she earned one of the first stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2010, she was inducted in the Philadelphia Broadcasting Pioneers Hall of Fame.
Miss King started singing as soon as she could talk, she told jazz journalist Marc Myers in a 2015 interview on JazzWax.com. “Singing to me came naturally,” she said, “like waking up.” Her daughter, Suzy, said: “She was wildly creative.”
She also sang popular jingles for TV commercials in the 1950s and signed contracts with Columbia Records and several movie production companies. She became a favorite guest on TV game and talk shows.
She performed jazz and popular songs on variety shows and benefits, and played it straight in comedy routines with Bob Hope, Tony Bennett, Bing Crosby, Mel Torme’, Sammy Davis Jr., Jimmy Stewart, Jack Benny, and other entertainers.
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Everyone said she remarkably resembled actor and singer Judy Garland, even Judy Garland. She went shopping with actors Debbie Reynolds, Jane Powell, and Dinah Shore.
A writer for The George Gobel Show nicknamed her “pretty perky Peggy King.” Gobel used it on air, and it stuck.
“The grand dame of song has left us,” composer Andrea Clearfield said on Facebook. Clearfield called Miss King “a musical legend and such a wonderful, heartfelt human being.”
Miss King stepped away from show business after she married Philadelphia clothier Sam Rudofker in 1961. They lived in Merion, Gladwyne, and Philadelphia, and she returned to performing with the Philly Pops Orchestra and other groups in the 1980s.
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“I know who I am, and I know where I belong,” she told the Daily News in 1983 after her son, Jonathan, and daughter, Suzy, left home for college. “I belong on a stage singing anything I can touch people with.”
She joined the Philadelphia-based All-Star Jazz Trio in 2013 after the death of her husband in 1994 and her son in 2000. In 2016, she released her first album in decades, Songs a la King.
“People turn to different things when their life turns upside down,” she told The Inquirer in 2016. “I lost them both in a short period. You either completely fall apart or you find a way to live with it. I knew the one thing I could count on was singing.”
In 2013, music writer A.D. Amorosi said in The Inquirer: “There’s bittersweet nuance to everything she sings.”
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Miss King also mentored other singers and supported the Philadelphia Boys Choir, the Curtis Institute of Music, and other organizations. Her husband shared his love of classical music, and she studied Mozart and other composers.
“She hungered for knowledge and always wanted to learn,” her daughter said. “She was a trailblazer.”
Margaret Elizabeth King was born Feb. 16, 1930, in Greensburg, Pa., 35 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. She told Marc Myers that she was adopted by her aunt and uncle during the Great Depression and that she inherited her singing voice from her birth mother, with whom she reconciled when she was a teen.
She practiced singing into a tin can on a broomstick when she was young, performed in all the school plays and musicals, and graduated from high school in Ohio when she was 16. She got jobs singing for a local radio station and a hotel band in Cleveland before being discovered by Spivak.
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“I came from poverty and had to find a way to get out of it through singing,” she told The Inquirer in 2016.
She married and divorced musician Knobby Lee in the 1950s and met Sam Rudofker while singing in Chicago. She moved to Saunders House from Philadelphia nine years ago.
Miss King was an avid reader and Civil War buff. She posed with President Harry S. Truman in front of a portrait of President Abraham Lincoln at the White House and was close friends with Larry Bowa, the former Phillies player and manager, and his former wife, Sheena.
Dennis Creedon, former director of education for what is now Opera Philadelphia, said Miss King “celebrated the gift of life in all she did. No matter what crisis life presented, ice cream was always her cure.”
Marc Myers asked her: “How would you prefer to be remembered?” Miss King said: “As an actress who sings. I’d like to think someone would read that.”
In addition to her daughter, Miss King is survived by her son-in-law, Dwain Goforth, and other relatives.
A private musical “Peggapalooza” is to be held later.
Donations in her name may be made to the Curtis Institute of Music, Attn: Advancement, 1726 Locust St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19103; the Philadelphia Boys Choir & Chorale, 1336 Spring Garden St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19123; and Main Line Health HomeCare & Hospice, 240 N. Radnor Chester Rd., Suite 100, Radnor, Pa 19087.
