Southold actress Peg Murray and the many roles she played

Born in Denver, Colo., in 1924 to parents of Scottish descent, Ms. Murray moved to New York City when she was 5. The Great Depression had just hit and her father, an attorney who had founded a law school in Colorado, went bankrupt.

“He was also a partner at a law firm in New York, thank God,” she said.

Ms. Murray took roles in high school theater productions but “didn’t count them,” she said.

“The difference between amateur theater and professional theater is quite wide,” she explained. “It’s another animal, really.”

When pressed to elaborate, Ms. Murray thought carefully before answering.

“When you’re new, you just want to learn the words and say them,” she said. “But that is so low on the list of a pro, who wants to know who the character is and how you can relate. And then how you can present it. And then how you can present it without looking as though you’re presenting it. It’s not recitation.”

Ms. Murray was on her way to becoming a pro when she graduated from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 1945, and was immediately offered a two-year stint with the Army as a civilian actress entertaining American GIs still in Germany.

“No matter how much you read or you know … when you see it, that’s another thing,” she said of post-World War II Europe. “Germany was rubble. There was no country.”

When she returned to the U.S. in 1947, Ms. Murray and some friends formed a traveling theater group called Touring Players Inc.

“We booked shows ourselves,” she said. “We’d go all the way down to Florida, then Texas and back to New York. It was very successful.”