Born in Canton, Ohio, Peggy Ann Garner was pushed by her mother into the limelight and entered in talent quests while still a child. By 1938 she had made her first film appearance, and over the next few years appeared in several more films, including Jane Eyre (1943) and The Keys of the Kingdom (1944). She reached the height of her success at the age of 13 in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), winning an Academy Juvenile Award largely for this performance. In the same year she showed she could handle comedy by giving a fine performance in Junior Miss (1945). Like many child performers, Peggy Ann Garner was unable to make a successful transition into adult film roles. She guest-starred steadily in television roles from the early 1950s through the 1960s. She was a regular panelist on the NBC television series, Who Said That?, along with H. V. Kaltenborn and Boris Karloff. In the summer of 1960, she was cast as Julie in the episode “Stopover” of David McLean’s NBC western series, Tate. In 1960 and again in 1962, she was cast in the episodes “Once Around the Circuit” and “Build My Gallows Low”, respectively, of the ABC series, Adventures in Paradise, with Gardner McKay. After her film career ended, she ventured into stage acting and had some success but also worked as a real estate agent and fleet car executive between acting jobs in order to support herself. In 1978, she surprised film audiences after a decade away from any feature film when she appeared as the pregnant aunt of the bride ‘Candice Ruteledge’ in the critically acclaimed ensemble Robert Altman film, A Wedding (1978). (Garner had worked with Altman before; he directed a 1961 episode of Bonanza, “The Rival”, in which she appeared as a girl being courted by Hoss Cartwright.) Her final screen performance was a small part in a 1980 made-for-television feature This Year’s Blonde.

Peggy Ann Garner married singer/game show host Richard Hayes, and they divorced in 1953. She married the actor Albert Salmi on May 16, 1956, and they divorced on March 13, 1963. Garner’s final marriage was to Kenyon Foster Brown. After a few years, that marriage, too, ended in divorce. Her only child, Catherine Ann Salmi, died in 1995 at the age of 38 from heart disease. Peggy Ann Garner died from pancreatic cancer in 1984 at the age of 52. Garner’s mother outlived both her only child and her only grandchild.