As a young actor, Peggy Cummins wanted to be Bette Davis
"The tendency was that if you’re short and blonde and reasonably pretty, you always played rather pretty parts."
Plenty of young girls dream of growing up to become a famous actor, but for Peggy Cummins, that dream became a reality.
The actor starred in popular crime films like Gun Crazy. Years later, the 1950 film was selected for the United States National Film Registry. Later, Cummins would appear in the cult horror classic, Curse of the Demon (1957).
“The tendency was then, that if you’re short and blonde and reasonably pretty, you always played rather pretty parts,” Cummins said, according to an article for the Herald and Review. “To tell you the truth, I always wanted to play all the Bette Davis Parts.”
Cummins’ Curse of the Demon co-star, Dana Andrews, seemed to have no cinematic idols.
“I used to watch those damn movies over and over, and after a while I began to take some notice of the way the actors went about their work,” Andrews said during an interview with The New Yorker.
“It didn’t look so difficult to me. One night, after I’d gone to bed, I began to think about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I didn’t like business. I didn’t like keeping accounts, which was what I was learning to do in college. I didn’t want to be ordinary. The only thing I had ever done that made me feel good was acting in those plays.”
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