Peg La Centra

Peg LaCentra, born in 1910, grew up in Boston. She very briefly attended the New England Conservatory of Music, studying piano. She also attended the Katharine Gibbs Finishing School and the Fenway Academy of Dramatic Art, as her early goal was to become an actress. Before moving to New York in 1931, she was an announcer at Boston radio station WNAC. Once she hit New York, she soon joined NBC as a singer and actress.

While singing with Dick McDonough's Orchestra on "The Mell-O-Roll Ice Cream Show," in 1936, Peg met Artie Shaw, then a sideman with McDonough. Shaw told her he was organizing his own orchestra and needed a singer. She joined Shaw in the summer of 1936, performing at the Lexington Hotel, the Paramount Theater in New York and on recordings. After Shaw's band broke up about a year later, she sang on radio with Benny Goodman. She and Goodman did not get along, and she quickly rejoined Artie Shaw when he formed another orchestra.

Although a good singer, Peg recorded very little; her recording output is confined to the 1930s. She recorded under her own name and, in addition to Shaw, with the orchestras of Victor Young and Johnny Green. In 1939, she was given her own program on NBC, "The Peg LaCentra Show."

She later appeared in a number of films and episodic TV, particularly dubbing non-singing actresses. The most famous of these are Susan Hayward in Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947) and Ida Lupino in The Man I Love (1946) and Escape Me Never (1947). She appeared (as herself) singing in the background of Joan Crawford's Humoresque (1946).

In 1939, Peg married radio actor Paul Stewart, an original member of Orson Welles' "Mercury Theater of the Air." They remained married until his death in 1986. She passed away of a heart attack on June 1, 1996, at her home in Los Angeles. She was 86.