Gregory Peck, born on 5 April1916, in La Jolla, California, United States of America, was a tall imposing American actor with a deep, mellow voice, best known for conveying characters of honesty and integrity.
A pharmacist’s son, Peck attended military school and San Diego State College before enrolling as a premed student at the University of California at Berkeley. There he developed a taste for acting, and upon graduation he headed to New York, where he studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse and supported himself as an usher at Radio City Music Hall and as a concession barker at the 1939 World’s Fair. He made his Broadway debut in The Morning Star (1942), the first of three consecutive flops in which he appeared, although critics liked Peck’s performances.
Invited to Hollywood, Peck made his
first film appearance as a Russian guerrilla fighter in Days of Glory
(1944). Because of an earlier spinal injury, he was unable to serve in World
War II. This circumstance enabled him to emerge as one of the most popular
leading men of the 1940s. He earned his first Academy Award nomination for
his performance as an idealistic missionary priest in The Keys of the Kingdom
(1944), and three years later he
received a second Oscar nomination for his interpretation of a journalist who
poses as a Jew in order to expose and anti-Semitism in Gentleman’s Agreement
(1947).Peck’s other notable films from this decade include The Valley of
Decision (1945), Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), Duel in the Sun (1946),
The Yearling (1946), and Yellow Sky (1948).
Although Peck worked with most of
the major Hollywood directors of the day, including Hitchcock, King Vidor,
William Wellman, William Wyler, Vincente Minnelli, and Lewis Milestone, he did some
of his finest work for Henry King. In King’s Twelve O’Clock High (1949),
The Gunfighter (1950), David and Bathsheba (1951), The Snows of Kilimanjaro
(1952), The Bravados (1958), and Beloved Infidel (1959), Peck portrayed
outwardly strong and authoritative individuals whose inner demons and
character flaws threaten to destroy them. He was finally honoured with an
Academy Award for his performance as the ethical and compassionate Alabama
lawyer Atticus Finch in the screen adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a
Mockingbird (1962). His subsequent screen roles included an anguished father in
the popular horror film The Omen (1976), the titular American general in MacArthur (1977),
and a rare villainous turn as Nazi doctor Josef Mengele in The Boys from Brazil
(1978). Although Peck continued to work into the early 1990s (at which time he
announced that he was largely retired), his final films are mostly forgettable.
Throughout his career, Peck received
the most praise for his portrayals of stoical men motivated by a quest for
decency and justice; he was less successful in performances demanding a broad
emotional range, such as his interpretation of Captain Ahab in Moby Dick
(1956), in which critics felt he failed to convey the compulsive qualities of
one of American literature’s most complex characters. Nevertheless, he was
an ingratiating performer, fully capable in roles that required him to be the
moral centre of a film. Peck was also widely admired and respected as one of
the motion picture industry’s most cooperative and least egotistical stars.
Outside of his film work, he was tirelessly active in civic, charitable, and
political causes. He served as chairman of the American Cancer Society and of
the trustee board of the American Film Institute (which he cofounded), and for
three years he was president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences.
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