Eldred Gregory Peck (April 5, 1916 – June 12, 2003) 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 more than 50 plays and three Broadway productions. He first gained critical success in The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), 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 (1945), Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) and family film The Yearling (1946). He encountered lukewarm commercial reviews at the end of the 1940s, his performances including The Paradine Case (1947) and The Great Sinner (1948). Peck reached global recognition in the 1950s and 1960s, appearing back-to-back in the book-to-film adaptation of Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951) and biblical drama David and Bathsheba (1951). He starred alongside Ava Gardner in The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) and Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday (1953).
Other notable films in which he appeared include Moby Dick (1956, and its 1998 mini-series), The Guns of Navarone (1961), Cape Fear (1962, and its 1991 remake), The Omen (1976) and The Boys from Brazil (1978). Throughout his career he often portrayed protagonists with "moral fiber". Gentleman's Agreement (1947) centered on topics of antisemitism, whilst Peck's character in Twelve O'Clock High (1949) 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 (1962), 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 Richard Nixon. 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" (née Ayres; 1894–1992), and Gregory Pearl Peck (1886–1962), a Rochester, New York–born chemist and pharmacist. His father was of English (paternal) and Irish (maternal) 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 (1864–1926), Peck was related to Thomas Ashe (1885–1917), 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.
thumb|Peck (right) with his father, 1930
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 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 Teachers’ College (now known as San Diego State University). 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 at , 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 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 performing. 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.
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. Twentieth Century Fox later claimed he had injured his back while rowing in college, 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
thumb|left|upright|Peck in his film debut [[Days of Glory (1944 film)|Days of Glory (1944)]]
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 (1944), directed by Jacques Tourneur, alongside top-billed Tamara Toumanova, a Russian-born ballerina. 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. and was largely dismissed by critics. |group= Film historian Barry Monush has written, "Peck's star power was evident from the word go." 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 (1944), he played 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 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 (1945), 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 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. Variety said: "Alfred Hitchcock handles his players and action in a suspenseful manner, and except for a few episodes of much scientific dialogue, maintains a steady pace in keeping the camera moving", adding that Peck "handles the suspense scenes with great skill". 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"; 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.
In The Yearling (1946), Bosley Crowther also wrote, "The strong bond of trust and wistful longing which exists between the boy and his "Pa" required the most sensitive tuning in order to ring sharp and true" and "the love of the lad for a pet fawn, which his father understands, had to be tenderly developed to appear wholly genuine." 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, 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". 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, 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.