Background

Ethnicity: His father was of English (paternal) and Irish (maternal) heritage and his mother of English and Scottish ancestry.

Eldred Gregory Peck was born on April 5, 1916, in La Jolla, San Diego, California. He was the son of Gregory Pearl Peck, a New York-born chemist and pharmacist, and his Missouri-born wife Bernice Mary "Bunny" (née Ayres). She converted to her husband's religion, Roman Catholicism. Through his Irish-born paternal grandmother Catherine Ashe, Peck was related to Thomas Ashe, who participated in the Easter Rising less than three weeks after Peck's birth and died while being force-fed during his hunger strike in 1917.

Peck's parents divorced when Gregory was five and he was brought up by his maternal grandmother, who took him to the movies every week.

Education

At the age of 10 Gregory was sent to a Catholic military school, St. John's Military Academy in Los Angeles. While he was a student there, his grandmother died.

At 14, he moved back to San Diego to live with his father, attended San Diego High School, and after graduating enrolled for one year at San Diego State Teacher's College (now known as San Diego State University). While there, he joined the track team, took his first theatre and public-speaking courses.

Peck however had ambitions to be a doctor and the following year gained admission to the University of California, Berkeley, as an English major and pre-medical student. Standing 6 ft 3 in (1.91 m), he rowed on the university crew. Although his tuition fee was only $26 per year, Peck still struggled to pay, and took a job as a "hasher" (kitchen helper) for the Gamma Phi Beta sorority in exchange for meals.

At Berkeley, encouraged by the acting coach who saw in him perfect material for university theatre, Peck became more and more interested in acting. He was recruited by Edwin Duerr, director of the university's Little Theater, and appeared in five plays during his senior year. Peck would later say about Berkeley that "it was a very special experience for me and three of the greatest years of my life. It woke me up and made me a human being." In 1997, Peck donated $25,000 to the Berkeley rowing crew in honor of his coach, the renowned Ky Ebright.

Peck was ready to graduate from Cal Berkeley, but was not able to graduate along with his friends because he lacked one course. His college friends were concerned for him and wondered how he'd get along without his degree. "I have all I need from the University," he told them, reassuringly.

Peck dropped the name "Eldred" and headed to New York City to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse with the legendary acting teacher Sanford Meisner. He was often broke and sometimes slept in Central Park. He worked at the 1939 World's Fair and as a tour guide for NBC's television broadcasting. In 1940, Peck learned more of the acting craft, working in exchange for food, at the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia, appearing in five plays including Family Portrait and On Earth As It Is. Later on, after becoming a well-known actor, Peck returned to Berkeley for that degree. Although it was an honorary degree, it was, nonethelss, a degree from Cal, his alma mater.

In 2000, Peck was made a Doctor of Letters by the National University of Ireland. He was a founding patron of the University College Dublin School of Film, where he persuaded Martin Scorsese to become an honorary patron.

Career

Gregory Peck 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 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.

On June 12, 2003, Peck died from bronchopneumonia while asleep at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87 years old.

Achievements

• An Academy Award winning actor, Gregory Peck was one of the most commendable actors of Hollywood, popularly known for his portrayal of larger-than-life characters. In fact, out of the total five nominations won by him at the Academy Awards, four of them came in the early days of his career. Peck received five Academy Award for Best Actor nominations and won once for his performance as Atticus Finch in the 1962 drama film To Kill a Mockingbird. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as Atticus Finch in the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird. In 1967, he received the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
  
  Peck also received several Golden Globe awards. He won in 1947 for The Yearling, in 1963 for To Kill a Mockingbird, and in 1999 for the TV miniseries Moby Dick. He was nominated in 1978 for The Boys from Brazil. He received the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1969, and was given the Henrietta Award in 1951 and 1955 for World Film Favorite – Male.
  
  In 1969, 36th U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson honored Peck with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. In 1971, the Screen Actors Guild presented Peck with the SAG Life Achievement Award. In 1989, the American Film Institute gave Peck the AFI Life Achievement Award. He received the Crystal Globe award for outstanding artistic contribution to world cinema in 1996. He received the Career Achievement Award from the U.S. National Board of Review of Motion Pictures in 1983. In 1986, Peck was honored alongside actress Gene Tierney with the first Donostia Lifetime Achievement Award at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain for their body of work. In 1987, Peck was awarded the George Eastman Award, given by George Eastman House for distinguished contribution to the art of film. In 1993, Peck was awarded with an Honorary Golden Bear at the 43rd Berlin International Film Festival. In 1998, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
  
  For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Gregory Peck has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6100 Hollywood Boulevard. In November 2005, the star was stolen, and has since been replaced.
  
  On April 28, 2011, a ceremony was held in Beverly Hills, California, celebrating the first day of issue of a U.S. postage stamp commemorating Peck. The stamp is the 17th commemorative stamp in the "Legends of Hollywood" series.

Works

More photos

• movie

  • Roman Holiday

    (Roman Holiday was nominated for ten Academy Awards, and A...)

    1953
  • Moby Dick

    (Herman Melville's towering epic of New England seafaring ...)

    1998
  • The Sea Wolves

    (Screen legend Gregory Peck and Roger Moore lead an allsta...)

    1981
  • Shoot Out

    (A cowboy, just out of prison and looking for revenge agai...)

    1971
  • Gregory Peck - His Own Man

    (Talented and enduring Academy Award-winning star, Gregory...)

    2008
  • The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit

    (An ex-army officer heads home after the war to pursue a c...)

    1956
  • To Kill a Mockingbird

    (Told through the eyes of "Scout," a feisty six-year-old t...)

    1962
  • Gentleman's Agreement

    (A writer passes himself off as Jewish to pen a series of ...)

    1947
  • Designing Woman

    (Gregory Peck and Lauren Bacall respectively portray a spo...)

    1957
  • The Purple Plain

    (A neurotic pilot's plane crashes in Burma during World Wa...)

    1955
  • The Big Country

    (An ex-sea captain (Gregory Peck) comes West to marry Carr...)

    1958
  • Captain Horatio Hornblower

    (Hornblower (Gregory Peck) battles the French and the Span...)

    1951
  • The Bravados

    (Jim Douglas has been relentlessly pursuing the four outla...)

    1958
  • Night People

    (An American intelligence agent and a kidnapped gi take pa...)

    1954
  • The Portrait

    (Hollywood superstars Lauren Bacall and Gregory Peck are d...)

    1993
  • I Walk The Line

    (A married backwoods Tennessee sheriff falls in love with ...)

    1970
  • Beloved Infidel

    (Toward the end of his life F. Scott Fitzgerald is writing...)

    1959
  • Boys from Brazil 1978

Religion

Peck was Roman Catholic and once considered entering the priesthood. Later in his career, a journalist asked Peck if he was a practicing Catholic. Peck answered, "I am a Roman Catholic. Not a fanatic, but I practice enough to keep the franchise. I don't always agree with the Pope... there are issues that concern me, like abortion, contraception, the ordination of women...and others." His second marriage was performed by a justice of the peace, not by a priest, because the Church prohibits remarriage if a former spouse is still living and the first marriage was not annulled. Peck was a significant fundraiser for a priest friend of his (Father Albert O'Hara), and served as co-producer of a cassette recording of the New Testament with his son Stephen.

Politics

In 1947, while many Hollywood figures were being blacklisted for similar activities, Peck signed a letter deploring a House Un-American Activities Committee investigation of alleged communists in the film industry.

A lifelong supporter of the Democratic Party, Peck was suggested in 1970 as a possible Democratic candidate to run against Ronald Reagan for the office of California Governor. Although he later admitted that he had no interest in being a candidate himself for public office, Peck encouraged one of his sons, Carey Peck, to run for political office. Carey was defeated both times by slim margins in races in 1978 and 1980 against Republican U.S. Representative Bob Dornan, another former actor.

In an interview with the Irish media, Peck revealed that former President Lyndon Johnson had told him that, had he sought re-election in 1968, he intended to offer Peck the post of U.S. ambassador to Ireland – a post Peck, owing to his Irish ancestry, said he might well have taken, saying "(It) would have been a great adventure". The actor's biographer Michael Freedland substantiates the report and says that Johnson indicated that his presentation of the Medal of Freedom to Peck would perhaps make up for his inability to confer the ambassadorship. President Richard Nixon, though, placed Peck on his enemies list owing to his liberal activism.

Peck was outspoken against the Vietnam War, while remaining supportive of his son, Stephen, who fought there. In 1972, Peck produced the film version of Daniel Berrigan's play The Trial of the Catonsville Nine about the prosecution of a group of Vietnam protesters for civil disobedience. Despite his reservations about American general Douglas MacArthur as a man, Peck had long wanted to play him on film, and did so in MacArthur in 1976.

In 1978, Peck traveled to Alabama, the setting of To Kill a Mockingbird, to campaign for Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Donald W. Stewart of Anniston, who defeated the Republican candidate, James D. Martin, a former U.S. representative from Gadsden.

In 1987, Peck undertook the voice-overs for television commercials opposing President Reagan's Supreme Court nomination of conservative judge Robert Bork. Bork's nomination was defeated. Peck was also a vocal supporter of a worldwide ban of nuclear weapons, and a lifelong advocate of gun control.

Views

Quotations: "I'm not a do-gooder. It embarrassed me to be classified as a humanitarian. I simply take part in activities that I believe in."

"I put everything I had into it — all my feelings and everything I'd learned in 46 years of living, about family life and fathers and children. And my feelings about racial justice and inequality and opportunity."

"I think I should have been more ferocious in pursuit of the whale, more cruel to the crew, and I think I'd have a better grasp now of what Melville was talking about. Ahab focused all his energies on avenging himself against the whale, but he was trying to penetrate the mystery of why we are here at all, why there is anything. I wasn't mad enough, not crazy enough, not obsessive enough. I should have done more.… At the time, I didn't have more in me."

"I don't think I could stay interested for a couple of months in a character of mean motivation."

"It just seems silly to me that something so right and simple has to be fought for at all."

"They say the bad guys are more interesting to play but there is more to it than that — playing the good guys is more challenging because it's harder to make them interesting."

"You have to dream, you have to have a vision, and you have to set a goal for yourself that might even scare you a little because sometimes that seems far beyond your reach. Then I think you have to develop a kind of resistance to rejection, and to the disappointments that are sure to come your way."

"Entertainment is all right, but entertainment with an idea behind it is much more important."

"I hold no brief for Communists, but I believe in and will defend their right to act independently within the law. I question whether members of the committee are interested in defending our form of government or whether they are attempting to suppress political opinion at odds with their own."

Membership

Peck pledged the Epsilon Eta fraternity in the San Diego State University.

Peck served as the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1967, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the American Film Institute from 1967 to 1969, Chairman of the Motion Picture and Television Relief Fund in 1971, and National Chairman of the American Cancer Society in 1966. He was a member of the National Council on the Arts from 1964 to 1966.

• American Film Institute

  1967 - 1969

• National Council on the Arts

  1964 - 1966

• Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

  1967

• 

  American Cancer Society

  1966

• Motion Picture and Television Relief Fund

  1971

Personality

With his notable talents and rugged good looks, Peck quickly established himself as one of the era's top leading men, appearing in numerous notable films.

Physical Characteristics: Peck was 6 ft 3 in (1.91 m). Blessed with a physically stout body, he was known for doing a majority of the fight scenes in his films on his own, rarely using body or stunt double.

Interests

• Politicians

  Donald W. Stewart, Jacques Chirac

• Sport & Clubs

  Peck owned the thoroughbred steeplechase race horse Different Class, which raced in England. The horse was favored for the 1968 Grand National but finished third.

Connections

In October 1942, Peck married Finnish-born Greta Kukkonen (1911–2008), with whom he had three sons, Jonathan (1944–1975), Stephen (b. 1946), and Carey Paul (b. 1949). They were divorced on December 31, 1955.

During his marriage with Greta, Peck had a brief affair with Spellbound co-star Ingrid Bergman. He confessed the affair to Brad Darrach of People in a 1987 interview, saying "All I can say is that I had a real love for her (Bergman), and I think that's where I ought to stop... I was young. She was young. We were involved for weeks in close and intense work."

On New Year's Day in 1956, the day after his divorce was finalized, Peck married Veronique Passani (1932–2012), a Paris news reporter who had interviewed him in 1952 before he went to Italy to film Roman Holiday. He asked her to lunch six months later and they became inseparable. They had a son, Anthony Peck (b. 1956), and a daughter, Cecilia Peck (b. 1958). The couple remained married until Gregory Peck's death.

Peck's eldest son, Jonathan, was found dead in his home on June 26, 1975, in what authorities believed was a suicide.

Peck had grandchildren from both marriages. One of his grandsons from his first marriage is actor Ethan Peck.

Father:

Gregory Pearl Peck

(1886–1962)

Mother:

Bernice Mary Ayres Maysuch

(1894–1992)

Spouse:

Veronique Peck

(February 5, 1932 – August 17, 2012)

Veronique Peck was a French-American arts patron, philanthropist and journalist. She was married to actor, political activist and philanthropist Gregory Peck until his death in 2003.

ex-spouse:

Greta Kukkonen

(January 25, 1911, Helsinki, Finland - January 19, 2008, Beverly Hills, California, United States)

Daughter:

Cecilia Peck

(b. May 1, 1958)

Cecilia Peck is an American film producer, director and actress. She is the only daughter of actor Gregory Peck and his second wife Veronique Passani.

Son:

Jonathan Peck

(July 20, 1944, Los Angeles, California, United States - June 26, 1975, Santa Barbara, California, United States)

Jonathan Peck was a journalist, television reporter and actor, known for The Big Country (1958).

Son:

Carey Paul Peck

(June 17, 1949, Los Angeles, California, United States)

Son:

Stephen Peck

(b. August 16, 1946, Los Angeles, California, United States)

Son:

Anthony Peck

(b. October 24, 1956 )

Grandson:

Ethan Gregory Peck

(b. March 2, 1986)

Ethan Gregory Peck is an American actor. Peck is the grandson of Academy Award winning actor Gregory Peck, and his first wife, Finnish-born Greta Kukkonen.

Friend:

Jacques Chirac

(b. 29 November 1932)

Jacques Chirac is a French politician who served as President of France and ex officio Co-Prince of Andorra from 1995 to 2007.

Collegue :

Audrey Hepburn

(4 May 1929 – 20 January 1993)

Audrey Hepburn was a British actress, model, dancer and humanitarian.

References

• Gregory Peck: A Charmed Life His first screen test was a disaster, his features were large and irregular, his left ear outsized the right, yet he would one day be headlined as the Most Handsome Man in the World. And most of his leading ladies—among them, Ingrid Bergman, Jennifer Jones, Audrey Hepburn, Sophia Loren, and Ava Gardner—would not disagree. Irreverent, candid, refreshingly honest, Lynn Haney's carefully researched biography not only charts the remarkable career of the Oscar-winning star but also plumbs Peck's frequently troubling complexity in his off-screen roles as husband, father, lover, and son. About the tough times, Haney minces no words; but the misfortunes by no means eclipse the energy, intensity, and excitement that characterized Peck's five decades of moviemaking.
  2003
• Gregory Peck: A biography Photos from Peck's personal family album join a wide selection of memorable film stills to illustrate the moving biography of a genuine star.
  1980
• Gregory Peck: A Biography An authoritative biography, the first ever written with the actor's cooperation, traces the illustrious career of this extremely private man who starred in such film classics as Roman Holiday, Horatio Hornblower, and To Kill a Mockingbird, revealing the many personal roles he has played in his life, from husband and friend to dedicated activist.
  2002
• Gregory Peck An illustrated book about the life and times of actor Gregory Peck.
  1977