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Born Eldred Gregory Peck in La Jolla, California, he was the son of
Bernice Ayres (a Missouri-born
convert to Catholicism) and
Gregory Peck (a chemist/pharmacist of Irish Catholic maternal descent and English paternal
ancestry). Gregory's paternal grandmother, Catherine Ashe, was related to the
Irish patriot Thomas Ashe,
who took part in the Easter
Rising in the year of Peck's birth and died on hunger strike in 1917. Despite their strict Catholic religion, Peck's parents divorced when he was
five and he was reared by his grandmother. Peck was sent to a Roman Catholic military
school in Los Angeles at the age of 10. He
attended San
Diego High School. When he graduated, he went to San
Diego State University to improve his grades so that he could earn admission
to his first choice, University of California,
Berkeley. For a short time, he took a job driving a truck for an oil
company. In 1936, he enrolled as a pre-med
student at UC Berkeley, majoring in English. Being 6'3" and very athletic, he
also decided to row on the university crew. He developed an interest in acting
and was recruited by the school's Little Theater and appeared in five plays his
senior year. Although his tuition fee was only $26 a year, Peck still struggled
to pay and had to work as a "hasher" (kitchen helper) for the Alpha Gamma Delta
sorority in exchange for meals. 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 he donated $25,000 to the
Berkeley crew team in honor of his coach, Ky Ebright.
After graduation, Peck dropped the name "Eldred" and headed to New York City in 1939 to study at the Neighborhood
Playhouse. 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. He made his Broadway debut as the
lead in Emlyn
Williams' 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 was
exempt from military service due to a back injury suffered while receiving dance
and movement lessons from Martha Graham as part of his acting training. Twentieth
Century Fox claimed he had injured his back while rowing a boat at
university. 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's first film was Days of Glory,
released in 1944. Though
many critics initially dismissed Peck's acting as wooden, he was nominated for
the Academy Award for Best Actor five times, four of
which came in his first five years of film acting: for The Keys of
the Kingdom (1944), The Yearling (1946), Gentleman's
Agreement (1947), and Twelve O'Clock High (1949).
Peck won the award for his fifth nomination, playing the role of Atticus
Finch, a Depression-era lawyer and widowed father, in the film adaptation of the
Harper Lee novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Released in 1962 during the height of the US civil
rights movement in the South; this movie is said to have been
Peck's favorite. In 2003, Atticus Finch was named the top film hero of the past
100 years by the American Film Institute. His other popular films include Roman Holiday, in which
he appeared as a reporter alongside Audrey Hepburn in her Oscar-winning debut. Peck
and Hepburn were close friends until her death, and Peck even introduced her to
her first husband, Mel
Ferrer.
In 1947, while 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. He
was outspoken against the Vietnam War, while remaining supportive of his son,
Stephen, who was fighting 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 initial
reluctance to portray the controversial General Douglas MacArthur on screen, he did so in 1977 and ended up with a great admiration for
the man.
In 1949, Peck founded The La Jolla
Playhouse, at his birthplace, along with his friends Jose Ferrer and Dorothy McGuire. This local community theater
and landmark (now in a new home at the University of California, San
Diego) still thrives today. It has attracted Hollywood film stars on hiatus both as performers and
enthusiastic supporters since its inception. In the 1980s he moved to television,
where he starred in the mini-series The Blue and the Gray, playing Abraham Lincoln. He
also starred in the TV film The Scarlet and The Black, about
a real-life Catholic
priest in the Vatican
who smuggled Jews and other refugees away from the Nazis during World War II.
For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Gregory Peck has a star
on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6100 Hollywood
Blvd. In November of 2005, the star was stolen. It has been replaced with a new
one. In 1979, he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame
at the National Cowboy &
Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
Peck retired from active film-making in 1991, having received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the
American
Film Institute in 1989 and Crystal Globe award for
outstanding artistic contribution to world cinema in 1996. A lifelong supporter of the Democratic Party, he was
suggested in 1970 as a possible Democratic
candidate to run against Ronald Reagan for the office of Governor of
California. In an interview with the Irish media, Peck revealed that former
President Lyndon Johnson had told
him that, had he sought re-election, he intended to offer Peck the post of US
ambassador to Ireland — a post Peck, on account of his Irish ancestry, said he
might well have taken, saying "it would have been a great adventure". Peck
encouraged his son, Cary, to run for national political office. Cary Peck was
defeated on both accounts in Southern California, in 1978 and in 1980, by
conservative Congressman Robert K. Dornan, first by a slim margin and
later by a much wider gap.
In 2000, he 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.
Peck also became chair of the American Cancer Society for a short time. Like Cary Grant did before him, Peck
spent the last few years of his life touring the world doing speaking
engagements in which he would show clips from his movies, reminisce, and answer
questions from the audience. He died in his sleep from natural causes at the age of 87 in Los
Angeles. He was survived by his second wife, Veronique
Passani, their two children, and two of his children from his first
marriage. His oldest son, Jonathan, committed suicide by a single gunshot blast
to the head in 1975.
Peck was then buried in the mausoleum of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the
Angels in Los Angeles, California. |
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