June 22, 2003

Gregory Peck, an Academy Award-winning actor who won the applause of critics and film-goers alike for roles ranging from a heroic country lawyer fighting racial prejudice in the American South to a Nazi scientist cloning little Hitlers to take over an unsuspecting world, died at his home in Los Angeles on Thursday, June 12, 2003. No cause of death was reported. He was 87.

Tall, dignified and possessing a resonant baritone voice, Peck stood in the front rank of Hollywood stars who emerged in the years after World War II. He was successful in all kinds of movies, from westerns and war stories to comedies and romances. But his most memorable performances were in films in which he embodied the ideals of courage, decency and fair play in ways that seemed to reassure viewers that those values, far from being lost, would always triumph over evil.

It was one of the chief reasons for his enduring popularity, and it was there to be seen in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), an adaptation of the best-selling novel by Harper Lee. Peck played Atticus Finch, a lawyer in rural Alabama in 1932 who defends a black man falsely accused of rape.

Released when the civil rights movement was in full flower in the South, the film was an unblinking portrayal of a society scarred by racial bigotry and a moving tale about how Finch, a widower, helped his two young children come of age. It won Peck an Oscar for best actor of the year. A picture in a similar vein was Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947), which was based on the novel by Laura Hobson. Peck’s part was that of a Gentile writer who impersonates a Jew in order to study anti-Semitism.

Peck was a star almost from the moment he arrived in Hollywood in 1943. He’d appeared in plays at the University of California at Berkeley and studied for two years on a scholarship to the Neighbourhood Playhouse in New York City. Casey Robinson, a screenwriter and producer, hired him to play the lead in Days of Glory (1944), a film about Russian resistance to the Nazis in World War II.

In his second film, The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), Peck played Father Francis Chisholm, a missionary priest, from youth to old age. His performance made him a matinee idol and won him the first of five nominations for a best-actor Oscar. He was a star for more than half a century.

Like many of the characters he portrayed, Peck supported numerous causes when he was away from the camera. The writer Cleveland Amory said he was “perhaps Hollywood’s best-liked liberal,” and he had the courage of his convictions.

In 1947, a time when many Hollywood figures were being blacklisted for similar activities, he signed a letter deploring a House Un-American Activities Committee investigation of alleged communists in the film industry. In the late 1980s, he recorded a television ad opposing President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of the conservative jurist Robert Bork to the US Supreme Court.

Peck once told an interviewer it was often assumed that his interest in politics began with his appearance in Gentlemen’s Agreement. He said that wasn’t so.

“I don’t get my politics from my roles in movies,” he said. “It’s true I was a Franklin Roosevelt man from way back. And I still am. I never worry much about the fat cats. They can take care of themselves. I empathize with the people who don’t have a decent chance to get anywhere because of unfairness and prejudice.”

President Lyndon B. Johnson named Peck to the National Council on the Arts when it was organized in 1965 and later conferred on him the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honour.

Peck’s other notable pictures included: The Yearling (1946), in which he played the father in a classic story about a boy who raises a pet deer in the 19th-century Florida wilderness and Twelve O’Clock High, (1949), a highly acclaimed film about World War II in which he portrayed a brigadier general who, before collapsing himself, instils discipline and morale in a B-17 bomber squadron that has suffered high casualties.

The Gunfighter appeared in 1950 and is regarded as one of his best films. It was the story of a gunslinger who wants to retire but finds himself challenged by younger men who want to take his reputation and his life. In Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951) he played the title role in the C.S. Forester novel about a British naval officer in the Napoleonic era.

He had the lead role in The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), based on the Ernest Hemingway short story about an unsuccessful writer dying in Africa. That was followed by Roman Holiday (1953), playing an American foreign correspondent; his co-star, Audrey Hepburn, won an Oscar for best actress. In The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), he played Tom Rath, an advertising man torn between the claims of ambition and conscience.

Peck’s later work included The Guns of Navarone (1961), a World War II commando film, and Cape Fear (1962), in which he played an attorney whose testimony leads to the conviction of a rapist who later attacks his wife and daughter (when the film was remade in 1991 starring Robert DeNiro, Peck made a cameo appearance).

After several box-office disappointments, he appeared in The Omen (1976), a horror film that grossed more than $100 million. In MacArthur (1977), he portrayed the famous general.

In 1978, with Laurence Olivier and James Mason, he starred in The Boys From Brazil, a black comedy in which he played Josef Mengele, the notorious physician who performed experiments on prisoners at the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. In the film, Mengele has escaped to the jungles of Brazil and is planning to release 94 cloned Hitlers on the world.

In 1989, Peck appeared in The Old Gringo, playing Ambrose Bierce, the American writer who disappeared during the Mexican revolution. His co-stars were Jane Fonda and Jimmy Smits.

Peck’s physical appearance was often compared to that of Abraham Lincoln, a hero of his since boyhood. In 1982, he got to play the 16th president of the United States in The Blue and the Gray, the much-praised television miniseries on the Civil War.

Eldred Gregory Peck was born in La Jolla, Calif., now a fashionable suburb of San Diego, but then little more than a fishing village. His father, Gregory “Doc” Peck, owned the local drug store, but went broke when a colleague embezzled $10,000. His mother was the former Bernice Ayres. She picked the name Eldred out of the local telephone book.

The senior Pecks separated when the boy was three and later were divorced. The future actor spent part of his boyhood with each parent. He graduated from a Catholic military school in Los Angeles and went to San Diego State University. A year later he dropped out and took a job driving a truck for an oil company. In 1936 he enrolled as a premed student in the University of California at Berkeley. He switched his major to English after he was recruited by the school’s Little Theatre. He rowed on the university crew in addition to appearing in five plays in his senior year.

Peck graduated in 1939 and moved to New York City to study at the Neighbourhood Playhouse. He was often broke and sometimes slept in Central Park, but “it didn’t seem like a hardship” he told an interviewer, “because New York was such an adventure.” A back injury suffered in college kept him out of the armed forces during World War II.

His early theatre credits included four Broadway plays and two productions that folded out of town. His film debut, Days of Glory, got poor reviews, but it brought the tall and handsome young star to the notice of the film industry. Peck soon had contracts with five major film-makers for more than a dozen pictures.

Peck was a past president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and in 1968 he received its Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. He also was the founding chairman of the American Film Institute and a recipient of its Life Achievement Award.

In 1991 he was one of the seven recipients of the annual achievement awards at the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington. Besides the Oscar he won for To Kill a Mockingbird and the nomination for The Keys of the Kingdom, he was nominated for best actor for The Yearling, Gentlemen’s Agreement and Twelve O’Clock High.

Peck’s marriage to the former Greta Rice ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, the former Veronique Passani; two sons of his first marriage; and two children of his second marriage. A son from the first marriage committed suicide in 1978.

Despite Peck’s eminence and honours, there were always critics who suggested that what he did most of the time was play himself. That prompted Kathleen Murphy to offer in Film Comment in 1992 this assessment of what the actor had come to stand for. He established his persona, she said, in The Keys of the Kingdom, and it was that of a “father for all seasons. His visage, voice and frame came to signal home ground, to shelter whole litters of lost sons and daughters, and to foster faith in just, though sometimes controversial, causes.” —Dawn/The LAT/WP News Service.

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