Péguy was trained at the Conservatoire de Paris, and began his professional career as a stage actor at the Bouffes du Nord theater, where he was sometimes paired with another future director, Maurice Tourneur.
[4] He was also credited for pushing young actors into prominent roles,[7] and gave Charles Vanel several of his early gigs, including his first appearance on record in a little known film named Jim Crow.
[9] When silent star Suzanne Grandais broke up with Gaumont in a salary dispute in 1913, her manager René d'Auchy retained Péguy's services to assist him as the director of a series of films made with German backing.
[19][20] To learn sound filmmaking, Péguy joined major Pathé-Nathan where he first made storyboards for director Pierre Colombier, starting with 1930's The King of the Gate Crashers, before directing a few films himself.
Popular composer Vincent Scotto helped him set up an adaptation of his musical Au pays du soleil (which launched Rellys' film career), and scored several more of his works.
[22] Péguy prominently featured children in his works and built up child actress Jacotte Muller—often just called Jacotte—as an in-house star who elicited modest comparisons to Shirley Temple.
[2] His first post-World War II project, the equidian crime caper Master Love, was not well distributed, which he blamed on an influx of American films that followed the end of the conflict.