GREGORY PECK: Gregory Peck, who has died aged 87, was an actor whose film career emphasised the importance of being earnest. Serious, restrained and intelligent, though never very exciting, he was one of Hollywood's most enduring stars.
At 6 ft 3 in tall, the lanky Peck was a pillar of moral rectitude standing up for decency and tolerance. In his most characteristic roles, his controlled baritone voice expressed sympathy and concern.
This is the image that most cinema audiences had of him, engendered by performances such as his Oscar-winning portrayal of Atticus Finch, the white lawyer who defends a southern black man on a rape charge in To Kill A Mockingbird (1962) - Peck's own favourite film.
Only last week Finch was named by the American Film Institute as the top screen hero in Hollywood history. "I've often joked that my obituary would read 'Academy Award-winner for (Mockingbird)'," Peck told an interviewer in 1989, on the release of his 53rd film, the unsuccessful Old Gringo. And, he added, "I'll settle for that."
So strong is this image of Peck that his few honourable attempts at comedy and his less successful portrayals of the baddie are often forgotten. But he was there opposite Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday (1953) and Lauren Bacall in Designing Woman (1957); as he was, too, in Duel In The Sun (1946), as Captain Ahab in Moby Dick (1956), filmed largely in Youghal, Co Cork, with a host of Irish actors, and as the Nazi Josef Mengele in The Boys From Brazil (1978). Perhaps his chiselled good looks worked against him, but Peck's best roles were as more complex variations of his honest liberal persona.
Director Henry King mined these characteristics best in 12 O'Clock High (1949), with Peck as a war-weary air force officer, and in The Gunfighter (1950), in which, sporting a moustache for the first time, he played an ageing gunfighter who wants to renounce violence but whose past makes him a target for every young killer on the make. Alfred Hitchcock also used Peck effectively in Spellbound (1945), where his outward solidity masks a serious phobia.
He was born in 1916, Eldred Peck, in La Jolla, California, the son of a Missouri mother and an Irish immigrant chemist named Gregory Peck. The latter was related through his own mother to Thomas Ashe, who took part in the Rising that year and died while on hunger strike in 1917.
The parents divorced when he was five and Eldred was brought up by his grandmother who took him to the movies every week. At 10 he was sent to a Roman Catholic military academy in Los Angeles, where he was indoctrinated by "tough Irish nuns".
"I had that stubborn streak, the Irish in me I guess," he once said.
Although he planned to become a doctor, and studied medicine at the University of California at Berkeley, he became more interested in acting almost by accident during his senior year. The director of the campus theatre spotted him walking across campus and asked him to try out for a part because he needed a "tall" actor. He soon switched his major to English, and performed in five plays during that year.
In 1939, at 23 he skipped graduation, and with $160 and a letter of introduction in his pocket, left for New York.
There he enrolled at the Neighborhood Playhouse as Gregory Peck. "I never liked the name Eldred," he recalled much later. "Since nobody knew me in New York, I just changed to my middle name."
At the Playhouse, he was taught movement by Martha Graham, who, he insisted, gave him the back injury that kept him out of uniform during the second World War. Later, 20th Century Fox claimed that the cause was a rowing injury. "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 explained.
Years later, he made up for the story by playing military brass in Pork Chop Hill (1959), The Guns Of Navarone (1961), The Sea Wolves (1980) and, above all, the title role of [General Douglas] MacArthur (1977), though he played the flamboyant US officer as if expressing disgruntlement were enough.
Peck made his Broadway debut as a young doctor in Emlyn Williams's wartime drama The Morning Star (1942), with Gladys Cooper. The New York Times critic wrote: "Peck plays with considerable skill, also avoiding in his acting the romantic tosh of the writing." A year later, he was in Hollywood, where he starred as a Russian partisan in Days Of Glory, a performance he preferred to forget. He was nominated for an Oscar for his second film, The Keys Of The Kingdom (1944); based on the A.J. Cronin novel, it gave Peck the chance to exude righteousness as a simple Catholic priest in China.
He continued to define decency in The Valley Of Decision (1945), as the scion of a mine-owning family who marries the maid (Greer Garson) against his parents' wishes, and as the stern but loving father in The Yearling (1946). In Gentleman's Agreement (1947), he had the archetypal Peck role as a journalist posing as a Jew to investigate American anti-semitism. He is particularly good when his repressed anger surfaces at a hotel where there are apparently no rooms available.
That same year, with Dorothy McGuire and Mel Ferrer, Peck founded the La Jolla Playhouse in southern California. There, he appeared in Patrick Hamilton's thriller Angel Street, Elliott Nugent's The Male Animal and Moss Hart's Light Up The Sky, before his film schedule became increasingly demanding.
Among his movies of the late 1940s and early 50s were two Hemingway adaptations, The Macomber Affair (1947), in which he was a white hunter resisting married Joan Bennett's advances, and The Snows Of Kilimanjaro (1952), having his pick of Ava Gardner and Susan Hayward. He played opposite Hayward again in David And Bathsheba (1951), cast because Darryl F. Zanuck thought he had "a biblical face".
But it was in westerns that Peck's dour integrity showed itself best: unshaven and tough in Yellow Sky (1948); a dude learning to adapt to the west in The Big Country (1958); and obsessively after the men who raped and killed his wife in The Bravados (1958). In the swinging 1960s, Peck's sober style seemed a little out of place, though he appeared in a couple of flashy Hitchcockian thrillers, Mirage (1965) and Arabesque (1966), and adapted to the new Hollywood as best he could, looking rather bothered as the father of a demon in The Omen (1976).
Always a supporter of liberal causes, in 1947, 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. He was simultaneously outspoken against the Vietnam war, while remaining a patriotic supporter of his oldest son, Jonathan, who was fighting there. In 1972, he produced the film version of Philip Berrigan's play, The Trial Of The Catonsville Nine, about the prosecution of a group of Vietnam protesters for civil disobedience.
In the 1980s, Peck moved into television with the mini-series The Blue And The Gray (1982), in which he played Abraham Lincoln. Still handsome into old age, with animated black eyebrows under a grey mane, in 1995 he toured in a show of film clips and reminiscences, answering questions from the audience, a task he continued for a further seven years. "I don't lecture and I don't grind any axes. I just want to entertain," Peck remarked.
He served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences three times (1967-70), and in 1971 chaired the Motion Picture and Television Relief Fund, which houses and hospitalises ageing film workers.He shared his energies with the public as well as his colleagues. He was a charter member of the National Council of the Arts in 1965 and helped raise its $4 million first federal subsidy for the arts. He worked hard for the American Cancer Society.
He maintained a close relationship with Ireland and in 1997 he was named Irish-American of the Year by Irish America magazine in New York. In an interview with Irish America, he said that President Lyndon Johnson told him that if he had served a second term he would have nominated the actor as ambassador to Ireland. Peck said he probably would have accepted. "It would have been a great adventure." He was a patron of the Ireland Funds.
In April 2000, aged 84, he was made a Doctor of Letters of the National University of Ireland. As a founding patron of the UCD School of Film, he persuaded director Martin Scorsese to become an honorary patron.
He is survived by his second wife, the French journalist Veronique Passani, whom he married in 1955. She had interviewed him for Paris Soir and, some months later, passed up an interview with Albert Schweitzer to take up his offer of a date. Their son and daughter survive him, as does the younger of the two sons of his first marriage. The older son, Jonathan, killed himself in 1975.
Eldred Gregory Peck: born April 5th, 1916; died June 12th, 2003.