Name: Eldred Gregory Peck Age: The count stopped at 87 Nationality: American Claim to fame: One of Hollywood’s most successful actors
OSCAR winner and one of Hollywood’s timeless hero’s, Eldred Gregory Peck breathed his last, last week.
For almost six decades, the tall, dark and handsome Gregory Peck, as he was popularly known, was a major presence on the cinema scene. He played men of moral fortitude and great dignity. The California-born onetime Berkeley pre-medical student became a star during the 1940s when a spinal injury prevented him from serving in World War II. From the onset, Gregory enjoyed unique leverage as a performer. He refused to sign a long-term contact with any one studio, as was the trend in those days, and selected all of his scripts, himself. He proved himself to be a versatile actor who was able to take on a wide range of roles, including those depicting the darker side of humanity as well as comic.
Gregory Peck found early success in Hollywood with only his second performance as a Scottish missionary in The Keys of the Kingdom earning him his first Best Actor Oscar nomination. Thereon his successful career had him playing vital roles in The Macomber Affair and The Snows of Kilimanjaro. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, he confirmed his star status, easily holding his own with the era’s most popular actress, Ingrid Bergman.
However, his greatest performance came in the 1962 classic, To Kill a Mockingbird. Portraying Aticus Finch, an idealist white Southern lawyer defending a black man wrongly accused of rape in the screen adaptation of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, not only earned Gregory cinematic immortality, but also won him his only Oscar. In fact, just before his death, Gregory’s Finch was chosen by American Film Institute as the greatest hero in movie history. Although Gregory continued to work in films throughout the 1960s and well into the 1990s, only a few of his later movies, such as The Omen and The Boys from Brazil, won critical applause.
Very much an activist, Gregory Peck supported many charitable and political causes. but cinema was one cause that remained true to him forever. He was the founder of the prestigious American Film Institute; thrice served s the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and was a member of the National Council for the Arts.
The quiet strength and dignity with which the tall, exceedingly handsome Gregory Peck invested many of his characters must have been a part of his personality as he was one of Hollywood’s few leading men who managed to steer clear of scandals of any kind. His wife of 48 years, Veronique Passani, was at his side when he died.
OSCAR winner and one of Hollywood’s timeless hero’s, Eldred Gregory Peck breathed his last, last week.
