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| Cult Icon Peggy Shannon |
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| Artist: | Otto Dyar |
| Date: | 1920s |
| Medium: | Gelatin Silver on Large Format Double Weight Photostock |
| Dimensions: | 11" x 14" |
| Condition: | Excellent |
| Original Use: | Hollywood Glamour Art |
| Price: | $375.00
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| Above: Full view |
The redheaded, spectacularly beautiful Peggy Shannon was brought to stardom as a replacement for the troubled flapper It girl Clara Bow, though her trajectory would be far more tragic. This 1920s large format gallery portrait for Paramount Pictures by Otto Dyar captures the jazz age beauty at her most radiant, and manages to suggest the vulnerability that would haunt her later years.
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| Above: Detail of Peggy Shannon |
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| Above: Blindstamp lower right |
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| Above: Verso view |
A Short Biography of Peggy Shannon by Hans J. Wollstein
Another Hollywood hard-luck case, red-haired Peggy Shannon (born Winona Sammon) was brought in by producer B.P. Schulberg as a replacement for Clara Bow, who had suffered a nervous breakdown during the production of The Secret Call (1931). Shannon earned heaps of publicity, and along with Sylvia Sidney, was considered Bow's replacement in more ways than one.
No overnight success, Shannon had studied dance with famous choreographer Ned Wayburn and had made her stage bow in the 1923 version of the Ziegfeld Follies. She returned for the 1924 show, which featured Will Rogers and Ann Pennington, and appeared in two subsequent editions of Earl Carroll's rival Vanities. Her acting debut came opposite Humphrey Bogart's wife, Mayo Methot, in What Ann Brought Home (1927), and she later interrupted an already waning Hollywood career to star in Page Miss Glory in 1934.
Although she certainly was easy on the eyes, Shannon did not have what it takes to become a screen star. In film after film, the expected sparks stubbornly refused to ignite and she was soon appearing in Grade-B assignments. The return to Broadway did little for her stature in Hollywood and by the late '30s, Shannon was playing bits. Divorced from actor Alan Davis, she remarried photographer Albert G. Roberts and it was he who found her slumped over a kitchen table in their North Hollywood home, dead from a liver ailment caused by acute alcoholism. Tragically, Roberts committed suicide less than three weeks later.
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