Born 1925 as Augusta Margaret Diane Fuller in Prestatyn, Denbighshire, Wales, actress Peggy Cummins appeared on the London stage in 1943 aged 17, playing the part of 12-year-old Fuffy in Junior Miss at the Saville Theatre and in the title role of Alice in Wonderland in 1944 at the Palace Theatre.
Cummins had her first major film in English Without Tears (1944) with Michael Wilding and Lilli Palmer, directed by Harold French and released in the United States as Her Man Gilbey. She followed this with Welcome, Mr. Washington (1944).
Cummins is best known for her performance in Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy (1950), playing a trigger-happy femme fatale, who robs banks with her lover. Her film career ended in 1961, although she made a handful of television appearances up to the mid-1960s.
In 2013, Cummins was honored at the Noir City Film Festival at the Castro Theater in San Francisco with a screening of a restored print of Gun Crazy. She died in 2017, eleven days after her 92nd birthday, at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London, England, following a stroke.
In 2020, Cummins was listed at number 16 on The Irish Times list of Ireland’s greatest film actors. Take a look at these vintage photos to see the beauty of young Peggy Cummins in the 1940s and 1950s.
