Baby Peggy

She was Hollywood's first female child star, trailing only "The Kid" (1921) juvenile Jackie Coogan and charming moviegoers 10 years before Shirley Temple. The cherub-cheeked, bob-haired Baby Peggy starred in a series of two-reel fairy tales for Century Pictures, among them "Little Red Riding Hood" (1922) and "Hansel and Gretel" (1923), and famously lampooned adult silent film stars Clara Bow, Pola Negri and Rudolph Valentino. In 1923, she signed a $150,000 contract with Universal Pictures and seemed poised for superstardom in "Captain January" (1924) until arguments over her profit share caused a rift between her manager parents and the studio brass. Blacklisted at age six and unable to work, Peggy rallied in vaudeville but returned after four years to a Hollywood that had no use for her. After a decade in bit parts, Peggy Montgomery broke from the film industry to remerge as a writer, adopting the professional name Diana Serra Cary and appointing herself a Hollywood historian. Author of informative books on movie cowboys, child actors, and a biography of old friend Jackie Coogan, she told her own story in 1996 with Whatever Happened to Baby Peggy: The Autobiography of Hollywood's Premiere Child Star. Able in old age to set aside the bitterness with which she had once considered her lost childhood, Diana Serra Cary embarked on a third, very late-life career as the last surviving star of silent films and the subject of the 2012 documentary "Baby Peggy: The Elephant in the Room."