Brassy blonde actress Margaret Whitton came from the New York stage, performing off-Broadway in "Baba Goya" (1973) and "Nourish the Beast" (both in 1973) and billing herself as Peggy Whitton at the time. She also appeared in a couple of lowbudget films but did not start making a strong name for herself until the early 80s when she billed herself as Margaret and made her Broadway debut in "Steaming" in 1982.

She impressed in films as well, effectively cast in sexy, hard-edged supports in such movies as the prison drama Love Child, the football dramedy The Best of Times with Robin Williams and Kurt Russell, and especially her breakout role in The Secret of My Succe$s in which she nearly stole the movie right from under Michael J. Fox as his hard-as-nails aunt by marriage. She complimented this "success" with a flashy role as the abhorrent widow-cum-baseball-team owner Rachel Phelps in Major League and its sequel, but was eclipsed by the heart-tugging storyline between Mel Gibson (his directing debut) and young Nick Stahl in the tearjerker The Man Without a Face in which she played Stahl's mother. Margaret has also been handed a plateful of TV series that never made it to first base, including a bickering wife opposite Dynasty's Christopher Cazenove in A Fine Romance and the soap-opera spoof Good & Evil, in which she played against type as the "good girl" opposite the more wicked-minded Teri Garr. In mini-movies she is best known for her portrayal of the tough-as-nails attorney Leslie Abramson in Menendez: A Killing in Beverly Hills.

Surprisingly, Margaret has been mostly off the large and small screens for the past decade, seemingly refocused these days on the theater. She has more recently appeared on Broadway in "And the Apple Doesn't Fall..." (1995) and the original, award-winning musical "Marlene" (1999), the story of legendary Marlene Dietrich that starred Siân Phillips.