Gregory Peck Biography

(born April 5, 1916, La Jolla, California, U.S.—died June 12, 2003, Los Angeles, California) tall, imposing American actor with a deep, mellow voice, best known for conveying characters of honesty and integrity.

A pharmacist's son, Peck attended military school and San Diego State College before enrolling as a premed student at the University of California at Berkeley. There he developed a taste for acting, and upon graduation he headed to New York, where he studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse and supported himself as an usher at Radio City Music Hall and as a concession barker at the 1939 World's Fair. He made his Broadway debut in The Morning Star (1942), the first of three consecutive flops in which he appeared, although critics liked Peck's performances.

Invited to Hollywood, Peck made his first film appearance as a Russian guerrilla fighter in Days of Glory (1944). Because of an earlier spinal injury, he was unable to serve in World War II. This circumstance enabled him to emerge as one of the most popular leading men of the 1940s. He earned his first Academy Award nomination for his performance as an idealistic missionary priest in The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), and three years later he received a second Oscar nomination for his interpretation of a journalist who poses as a Jew in order to expose anti-Semitism in Gentleman's Agreement (1947). Peck's other notable films from this decade include The Valley of Decision (1945), Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), Duel in the Sun (1946), The Yearling (1946), and Yellow Sky (1948).

Although Peck worked with most of the major Hollywood directors of the day, including Hitchcock, King Vidor, William Wellman, William Wyler, Vincente Minnelli, and Lewis Milestone, he did some of his finest work for Henry King. In King's Twelve O'Clock High (1949), The Gunfighter (1950), David and Bathsheba (1951), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), The Bravados (1958), and Beloved Infidel (1959), Peck portrayed outwardly strong and authoritative individuals whose inner demons and character flaws threaten to destroy them. He was finally honoured with an Academy Award for his performance as the ethical and compassionate Alabama lawyer Atticus Finch in the screen adaptation of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). His subsequent screen roles included an anguished father in the popular horror film The Omen (1976), the titular American general in MacArthur (1977), and a rare villainous turn as Nazi doctor Josef Mengele in The Boys from Brazil (1978). Although Peck continued to work into the early 1990s (at which time he announced that he was largely retired), his final films are mostly forgettable.