Gregory Peck
Eldred Gregory Peck was an American actor and one of the most popular film stars from the 1940s to the 1970s. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Peck the 12th-greatest male star of Classic Hollywood Cinema.
After studying at the Neighborhood Playhouse with Sanford Meisner, Peck began appearing in stage productions, acting in over 50 plays and three Broadway productions. He first gained critical success in The Keys of the Kingdom, a John M. Stahl–directed drama that earned him his first Academy Award nomination. He starred in a series of successful films, including romantic-drama The Valley of Decision, Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, and family film The Yearling. He encountered lukewarm commercial reviews at the end of the 1940s, his performances including The Paradine Case and The Great Sinner. Peck reached global recognition in the 1950s and 1960s, appearing back-to-back in the book-to-film adaptation of Captain Horatio Hornblower and biblical drama David and Bathsheba. He starred alongside Ava Gardner in The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday.
Other notable films in which he appeared include Moby Dick, The Guns of Navarone, Cape Fear, The Omen, and The Boys from Brazil. Throughout his career, he often portrayed protagonists with "moral fiber". Gentleman's Agreement centered on topics of antisemitism, while Peck's character in Twelve O'Clock High dealt with the challenges of military leadership and post-traumatic stress disorder during World War II. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, an adaptation of the modern classic of the same name which revolved around racial inequality, for which he received acclaim. In 1983, he starred opposite Christopher Plummer in The Scarlet and The Black as Hugh O'Flaherty, a Catholic priest who saved thousands of escaped Allied POWs and Jewish people in Rome during the Second World War.
Peck was also active in politics, challenging the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 and was regarded as a political opponent by President Richard Nixon. President Lyndon B. Johnson honored Peck with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 for his lifetime humanitarian efforts. Peck died in his sleep from bronchopneumonia at the age of 87.
Early life
Eldred Gregory Peck was born on April 5, 1916, in the neighborhood of La Jolla in San Diego, California, to Bernice Mae "Bunny", and Gregory Pearl Peck, a Rochester, New York–born chemist and pharmacist. His father was of English and Irish heritage, and his mother was of English and Scots ancestry. She converted to her husband's religion, Catholicism, and Peck was raised as a Catholic. 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 a hunger strike in 1917.Peck's parents divorced when he was five, and he was brought up by his maternal grandmother, who took him to the movies every week. At the age of 10, he 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. He attended San Diego High School and, after graduating in 1934, enrolled for one year at San Diego State Teacher's College. While there, he joined the track team, took his first theatre and public-speaking courses, and pledged the Epsilon Eta fraternity. Peck had ambitions to be a doctor and later transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, as an English major and pre-medical student. Standing, 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" for the Alpha Gamma Delta sorority in exchange for meals.
At Berkeley, Peck's deep, well-modulated voice gained him attention, and after participating in a public speaking course, he decided to try acting. He was encouraged by an acting coach, who saw in him perfect material for university theatre, and he 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, including as Starbuck in Moby Dick. Peck later said about his years at 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 1996, Peck donated $25,000 to the Berkeley rowing crew in honor of his coach, Ky Ebright.
Career
1939–1943: Beginnings and stage roles
Peck did not graduate with his friends because he lacked one course. His college friends were concerned for him and wondered how he would get along without his degree. "I have all I need from the university", he told them. 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 as a barker, at Rockefeller Center as a tour guide for NBC television, and at Radio City Music Hall. Before 1940, he dabbled in modelling, and worked in exchange for food at the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia, where he appeared in five plays, including Family Portrait and On Earth As It Is.His stage career began in 1941, when he played the secretary in a Katharine Cornell production of George Bernard Shaw's play The Doctor's Dilemma. The play opened in San Francisco just one week before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He made his Broadway debut as the lead in Emlyn Williams' The Morning Star in 1942. His second Broadway performance that year was in The Willow and I with Edward Pawley. Peck's acting abilities were in high demand during World War II since he had been exempted from military service because of a back injury suffered while receiving dance and movement lessons from Martha Graham as part of his acting training. Twentieth Century Fox later claimed he had injured his back while rowing at university, but in Peck's words, "In Hollywood, they didn't think a dance class was macho enough, I guess. I've been trying to straighten out that story for years." Peck performed in a total of 50 plays, including three short-lived Broadway productions, 4–5 road tours, and summer theater.
1944–1946: Hollywood breakthrough
After gaining stage recognition, Peck was offered his first film role at RKO Radio Pictures, the male lead in the war-romance Days of Glory, directed by Jacques Tourneur, alongside top-billed Tamara Toumanova, a Russian-born ballerina. Peck portrayed the leader of Russian guerrillas resisting the Germans in 1941 who stumble across a beautiful Russian dancer, who had been sent to entertain Russian troops; they protect her by letting her join their group. During production of the film, Tourneur "untrained" Peck from his theater training where he was used to speaking in a formal manner and projecting his voice to the entire hall. Peck considered his performance in the film as quite amateurish and did not wish to watch the film after it was released. The film lost money at the box office, disappeared from theaters quickly, and was largely dismissed by critics.At the time of the film's release, critic Bosley Crowther of The New York Times assessed it as slow-moving and verbose, adding that Peck's acting was stiff. Film historian Barry Monush has written, "Peck's star power was evident from the word go." Following the release of the film, Peck gained the attention of producers, but rather than participate in the studio system, he decided to remain a freelancer with the ability to choose his roles, signing non-exclusive contracts with four studios, including an unusual dual contract with 20th Century Fox and Gone With the Wind producer David O. Selznick.
In Peck's second movie, The Keys of the Kingdom, he plays an 80-year-old Roman Catholic priest who looks back at his undertakings during over half a century of his determined, self-sacrificing missionary work in China. The film shows the character aging from his 20s to 80; Peck was featured in almost every scene. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, including the Academy Award for Best Actor, which was Peck's first nomination. Although the film finished only 27th at the box office in North America for 1944, Jay Carr of Turner Classic Movies refers to it as Peck's breakthrough performance, while writer Patrick McGilligan says that it "catapulted him to stardom". At the time of release, Peck's performance was lauded by Variety and The New York Times, despite mixed reviews for the film itself. The Radio Times referred to it as "a long, talkative and rather undramatic picture" but admitted that "its success saved Peck's career". Craig Butler of AllMovie states "he gives a commanding performance, full of his usual quiet dignity and intelligence, and spiked with stubbornness and an inner fire that make the character truly come alive".
In The Valley of Decision, a romantic drama about intermingling social classes, Peck plays the eldest son of a wealthy steel mill owner in 1870s Pittsburgh who has a romance with one of his family's maids, portrayed by Greer Garson. who was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Upon release, reviews from The New York Times and Variety were somewhat positive, with Peck's performance described as commanding. It was North America's highest-grossing movie of 1945.
Peck's next film was the first of two collaborations with director Alfred Hitchcock, the suspense-romance Spellbound, opposite Ingrid Bergman. Peck plays a man who is thought to be the new director of the psychiatric facility where Bergman's character works as a psychoanalyst, while his amnesia and disturbing visions suggest he may be a murderer. Peck and Hitchcock were described as having a cordial but cool relationship. Hitchcock initially hoped that Cary Grant would play the male lead. Peck later stated that he thought he was too young when he first worked with Hitchcock and that the director's on-set indifference to his character's motivation, important to Peck's acting style, shook his confidence. Peck's chemistry clicked with his screen partner Bergman; the actors were romantically linked at the time.
Released at the end of 1945, Spellbound was a hit, ranking as the third-most successful film of 1946. Spellbound was well received by critics at the time, as was Peck's performance. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times praised the film, stating that Peck's performance "restrained and refined, is precisely the proper counter to Bergman's exquisite role"; Frank Miller of Turner Classic Movies has written that the movie accelerated the rise of Peck into a Hollywood star and even "a major sex symbol." Producer David O. Selznick noted that during preview tests of the movie, the women in the audiences had substantive reactions to the appearance of Peck's name during the opening credits, stating that during his first few scenes the audience had to be shushed to quiet down. Spellbound was nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture, although it was not in the National Board of Review's top ten films of the year.
In The Yearling, Peck portrays a kind-hearted father, opposite onscreen wife, Jane Wyman, whose son finds and insists on raising a three-day-old fawn in 1870s Florida. Reviews upon release were very positive with Bosley Crowther evaluating it as a film that "provides a wealth of satisfaction that few films ever attain". The Yearling was a box office success, finishing with the ninth highest box office gross for 1947, and landed six Academy Award nominations, including Best Actor. Peck won the Golden Globe for Best Actor for performance. In recent decades, it has continued to receive critical praise with Barry Monush writing that it was "one of the best-made and most-loved family films of its day".
Peck took his first "against type" role, playing a cruel, amoral cowboy, in the Western soap opera Duel in the Sun with top-billed Jennifer Jones as the provocative temptress-object of Peck's love, anger, and desire. Their chemistry is described by film historian David Thomson as "a constant knife fight of sensuality". Joseph Cotten starred as Peck's righteous half brother and competitor for the affections of the "steamy, sexpot" character of Jones; the movie was resoundingly criticized and even banned in some cities due to its lurid nature. The publicity around the eroticism of Duel in the Sun, one of the biggest movie advertising campaigns in history, used a new tactic of opening in hundreds of theaters across the U.S. at once, saturating the theaters in cities where it opened, resulting in the film's being the second highest-grossing movie of both 1947 and all of the 1940s. Nicknamed "Lust in the Dust", the film received mostly negative reviews upon release- Bosley Crowther wrote that "performances are strangely uneven," although Jones received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. The opinions of Peck's performance have been polarized.