Southold actress Peg Murray and the many roles she played

In 1952, LIFE magazine wrote an article about the Touring Players.

“The demand for theater – and for good theater, at that — has showed itself all through the U.S. this season,” the magazine wrote. “It has brought a boom to road shows, has stirred Texas showmen to plan their own local productions of new Broadway hits and has given an obscure but excellent little traveling company, the Touring Players, the best season it has ever had.”

Acting on the road was exciting, fulfilling and sometimes scary, she said. When the troupe began booking gigs at black colleges in the South, they confronted the ugliness of racism firsthand.

In the early 1950s, the Touring Players were performing for a packed audience at Louisiana State College — known at that time as Louisiana State College for Negroes — when Ms. Murray went backstage and heard what she described as a “big bang.”

“I thought, ‘Oh God, a light exploded,’ı” she said. “And my director said, ‘No, Peg, that was a gun.’ There were two or three shots. We were all terribly upset. Later, I talked to the dean of the college and said, ‘Well, did we call the police?’ And he said, ‘Peg, that WAS the police.’

“I nearly died,” she said. “Talk about an education. They were mad that white people were playing for blacks.”

In 1955, Ms. Murray left the acting group in search of more permanent work in New York City. She landed her first major role in the 1956 Broadway production of “The Great Sebastians” starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine. She later took roles in “Gypsy” with Ethel Merman, “Anyone Can Whistle” with Angela Lansbury and “Flora the Red Menace” with Liza Minnelli, to name a few.

The theater community rewarded Ms. Murray handsomely in 1967, when she won a “Best Actress” Tony Award for her performance as Fraulein Kost in the original production of “Cabaret.”

She loved winning — “That was self-affirming,” she said — but the attention that came with it was practically unbearable.

“It was one of the worst days of my life,” she said. “The phone never stopped. The door was banging. And the flowers kept coming and coming. All of that, you see, I can do without.”