Gregory Peck

Actor

  • Born: April 15, 1916
  • Birthplace: La Jolla, California
  • Died: June 12, 2003
  • Place of death: Los Angeles, California

American actor

Peck was a leading Hollywood film star who usually starred in roles that expressed quiet leadership and a well-defined sense of morality. His personal life often reflected his acting roles. He cofounded the La Jolla Playhouse, served the film and arts communities, and appeared on President Richard Nixon’s so-called enemies list for his political views.

Areas of achievement Film, patronage of the arts, theater and entertainment

Early Life

Gregory Peck was born Eldred Gregory Peck to Bernice “Bunny” Ayres and Gregory Peck, a pharmacist. His parents divorced when he was six years old, and Peck lived principally with his grandmother and mother until the age of ten. He attended St. John’s Military School in Los Angeles and graduated from ninth grade as a cadet captain. He then moved back to San Diego and attended San Diego High School, living principally with his father. Although his father expected his son to become a physician, mediocre high school grades forced Peck to enroll for a year at San Diego State University to improve his grades and transfer to the University of California, Berkeley.

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Once at Berkeley, however, Peck became an English major and expected to pursue a career in journalism or college teaching. He was six foot two inches in height and had rowed crew since high school. He made his theatrical debut as a junior in college when his height made him noticeable as the ideal person for the role of a tall Starbuck in a Berkeley dramatic adaptation of Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby-Dick.

Peck dropped out of Berkeley during his senior year; he also dropped the use of his first name, Eldred. He traveled to New York City to seek a career in theater, but his first job was as a barker at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. He then worked at various jobs, including waiting tables, modeling men’s clothing, and as the “happy worker” in ads for New Jersey Power & Light. He successfully auditioned for Sanford Meisner’s Neighborhood Playhouse, an experience that allowed him to study with dancer-choreographer Martha Graham.

A back injury during a workshop with Graham kept him out of World War II and made him available as a handsome leading man in an era when many of Hollywood’s stars were serving in the armed forces. Peck married Greta Kukkonen in 1943, and they had three sons: Jonathan, a television news reporter who committed suicide in 1975; Stephen, a Vietnam Veterans of America (VVOA) activist; and Carey, an unsuccessful Democratic nominee in two congressional elections. Peck and Kukkonen’s marriage ended in divorce in 1955, but it did not take long for Peck to marry again, this time with Veronique Passani, a Parisian news reporter whom he met while filming Roman Holiday (1953) in Italy and France. They had a son, Anthony, and a daughter, Cecilia.

Life’s Work

Summer stock work in New York and on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1941-1942 allowed Broadway director Guthrie McClintic to discover Peck, casting him two times in 1942 (in The Morning Star and The Willow and I) and again in 1943 in Sons and Soldiers (with Stella Adler and Karl Malden).

Peck was drawn back to California by the wartime film industry, and he established his onscreen persona from his earliest Hollywood roles, playing a Russian partisan in Days of Glory (1944) and a Roman Catholic priest in The Keys of the Kingdom (1944). Peck received four Academy Award nominations for Best Actor in his first five years in Hollywood for The Keys to the Kingdom, The Yearling (1946), Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), and Twelve O’Clock High (1949). He continued to pursue the roles of noble characters, from father and farmer Penny Barker in The Yearling to a reporter with a social conscience, covering anti-Semitism, in Gentleman’s Agreement. However, Peck maintained a lifelong commitment to the craft of acting and at times accepted roles seemingly counter to his persona and his values. For example, he played a viciously cruel gunfighter in Duel in the Sun (1946) and had action roles in Pork Chop Hill (1959) and The Guns of Navarone (1961).

From his earliest days in acting, Peck was involved with the arts community and with local and national causes. With fellow actors Dorothy McGuire and Mel Ferrer he cofounded the La Jolla Playhouse in 1947, and he continued to return for over five decades as an actor, producer, and director at the original playhouse and in its later home at the University of California, San Diego. Peck helped to found the American Film Institute (AFI) and served as its board chair from 1967 to 1969. He also served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and was a national chair of the American Cancer Society’s annual fund drive.

Peck’s signature role as the widowed and principled small-town Southern lawyer Atticus Finch in the film adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) earned him the Best Actor Academy Award at the virtual height of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. On multiple occasions, Peck referred to the film and the role as his favorites in a career that spanned six decades. Indeed, in 2003, the AFI named Atticus Finch the top film hero of the first one hundred years of American cinema.

Even as an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, Peck remained supportive of his son Stephen, who fought in combat there. Peck produced the film version of Daniel Berrigan’s play, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1972), and also played General Douglas MacArthur (MacArthur, 1977). Peck’s later work does not receive the attention of his earlier work, though his roles in The Boys from Brazil (1978), Old Gringo (1989), and a remake of Cape Fear (1991) received critical acclaim. With eloquent symmetry, Peck played the memorable but minor Father Mapple in the television miniseries adaptation of Melville’s Moby-Dick in 1998 (he was nominated for an Emmy Award as Outstanding Supporting Actor for this role).

Significance

Peck was a stoic and principled actor who was committed to the art of film. His career, which comprised fifty-three feature films and four television miniseries with staying power and continued relevance, connected the early decades of the Hollywood film industry with the twenty-first century. His Broadway stage roles and his work to promote local and regional theater provide templates of exemplary behavior for future generations of actors, both on stage and on screen.

Bibliography

Everitt, David. “A Bushel of Peck.” Entertainment Weekly, March, 1998, pp. 95-96. Review of Peck’s career, concurrent with the celebration of the actor’s eighty-second birthday and his performance in the one-person show, A Grand Evening with Gregory Peck, at the La Jolla Playhouse.

Fishgall, Gary. Gregory Peck: A Biography. New York: Scribner’s, 2002. A biographer of film stars Burt Lancaster and James Stewart, Fishgall provides a sympathetic biography of Peck that includes the words of Peck himself, spoken in the final years of his life.

Munn, Michael. Gregory Peck. Bellevue, Wash.: Robert Hale, 1999. Derivative biography, published by a nautical publishing house. Readable and brief but provides no new insight concerning Peck’s life.

Thomson, David. The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. An alphabetical listing of major films and film stars, including a comprehensive though opinionated filmography of Peck and his acting career.

1941-1970: 1946-1960: Hollywood Studio System Is Transformed; 1946-1962: Westerns Dominate Postwar American Film; July 11, 1960: Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird Calls for Social Justice.