Baby Peggy

Silent moppet star Jackie Coogan, immortalized as Charles Chaplin's The Kid (1921), had only one screen rival during the early 1920s, and that was none other than Baby Peggy. She was "discovered" while visiting the Century Studios lot on Sunset Boulevard with her mother when she was a mere 19 months old and went on to appear in nearly 150 shorts (between 1920 and 1923) and nine feature films during her silent heyday. Often considered a precursor to Shirley Temple, Baby Peggy's most popular film vehicle was the child classic Captain January (1924), which would be made a decade later as a vehicle for Temple. She was born Peggy-Jean Montgomery in 1918 in San Diego, California, of acting stock. She was the daughter of Marian (Baxter), from Wisconsin, and Jack Montgomery, a Nebraska-born cowboy for years all over the western states. He ended up in the movies as a stuntman and extra, driving stagecoaches and buckboards. He supported himself as Tom Mix's double, but never achieved the rugged