Gregory Peck, an actor in the classical mould: A tribute

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Bangladeshis became familiar with the lanky Gregory Peck's devilishly handsome looks through the much acclaimed 1953 romantic comedy, "Roman Holiday," in which Peck played a chivalrous American journalist based in Rome to the introducing Audrey Hepburn's princess. (Hepburn won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance.) The film was screened in Dhaka's air-conditioned Naz cinema hall, which in those days screened only English movies. As young boys growing up in the sixties, we liked the 1961 WWII thriller in which Peck played the role of an idealistic officer, "The Guns of Navarone," even better. To forestall a possible teenage revolt, in the autumn of 1963, our Principal at Faujderhat Cadet College, Lt. Col. Maurice Brown, arranged a special screening of "The Guns of Navarone" for the students of the school at a Chittagong cinema hall!

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Of course, Gregory Peck's greatest role was as that of the gentle, doting father of two small children, Atticus Finch, in Harper Lee's 1962 racial drama, "To Kill a Mockingbird," in which Peck played a small town white Southern lawyer who incurred the wrath of the townspeople by defending a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman. Nominated for the Best Actor Oscar five times, Peck won the Oscar for his role in this film. Peck said in a 1989 interview: "I put everything into it -- all my feelings and everything I'd learned in 46 years of living, about family life and fathers and children. And my feelings about racial justice and inequality and opportunity." How appropriate that just one week before Gregory Peck died, American Film Institute ranked Gregory Peck's Atticus Finch as Number One, among the top heroes in the history of American cinema! "I think Gregory Peck's whole career was defined by that film, because he was the classic, quintessential American hero -- a fellow who puts to hazard his whole future in order to do something he believes is right to do," said Jack Valenti, president and chief executive officer of the Motion Pictures Association of America.

The fictional Artticus Finch and the real life Gregory Peck was a perfect match. A Roosevelt New Dealer, (he campaigned for Harry Truman in 1948 when nobody thought Truman had a chance to win) throughout his adult life, Gregory Peck was an activist for liberal social causes. An advocate of nuclear disarmament; Peck once said that he would give up everything he had if the nuclear race could be reversed. "Gentlemen's Agreement," (1947) in which Peck played a magazine writer who poses as a Jew to expose anti-Semitism was considered risky at that time. Peck's agent cautioned him: "You're just establishing yourself, and a lot of people will resent the picture. Anti-Semitism runs very deep in the country." Peck ignored the agent's advice, the film made money, and won the Best Picture Award. In 1972 Peck produced the anti-Vietnam War film, "The Trial of Catonsville Nine." In 1987, Gregory Peck earned the ire of the Republican conservatives when he lent his voice for a 60-second television ad opposing President Ronald Reagan's nomination of the rightwing judge, Robert H. Bork, to the Supreme Court. Judge Bork's nomination failed.

Born on April 5, 1916 in La Jolla, California, to an Irish immigrant father and a Missourian mother (they divorced when he was 3) Eldred Gregory Peck was primarily brought up by his grandmother. He attended the Roman Catholic St. John's Military Academy in Los Angeles, where he was "indoctrinated by tough Irish nuns and square-jawed ROTC officers," and the very prestigious University of California at Berkeley, where he majored in English and drama and paid his way as a janitor, waiter and dishwasher. It was while performing in "Anna Christie" and other productions at the university's Little Theater that Peck decided to become an actor. Peck graduated from Berkeley in 1939, the year "Gone with the Wind," and "The Wizard of Oz" was released. The same year Peck moved to New York City, won a scholarship to the Neighbourhood Playhouse, where he studied Method acting under Sanford Meisner. A back injury exempted him from military service during World War II. Although his Broadway debut, "Morning Star" flopped, Peck's performance drew the attention of such Hollywood moguls as Darryl Zanuck. Since all the eligible leading men had gone to war, Peck's stock soared from the start. Hollywood's top box-office draw for several years, by 1962 Peck was earning at least a million dollars per movie, a huge sum in those days. Peck was the governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for 15 years, the Academy President from 1967 to 1970, and the founding Chairman of the American Film Institute (1967-69). In 1989 Peck received American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award. Gregory Peck was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. Peck trained thoroughbred racehorses in his spare time.

With a "chiseled, slightly melancholy good looks, resonant baritone and quiet strength," Gregory Peck was made in the classical British mould of acting. He is more reminiscent of Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir Alec Guinness than of the American contemporaries of his earlier days, such as Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart. In his stage, film and television roles, Peck projected the image of wholesomeness and vulnerability, and "morally anguished heroes who displayed grace under fire." And for over fifty years, he starred in an astonishingly varied array of roles. Whether playing a maverick priest in "Keys of the Kingdom (1944)," an amnesiac in Alfred Hitchcock's thriller "Spellbound (1945)," combat heroes in "Twelve O'clock High (1949)" and "Pork Chop Hill (1959)," westerners in "Yellow Sky" and "The Gun Fighter (1950)," a romantic in "Roman Holiday," harried advertising executive in "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956)," Peck's quiet dignity came through, as it also did when he played legendary characters such as King David in "David and Bathsheba (1951)," obsessed sea captains in "Moby Dick (1956)," and "Captain Horatio Hornblower," F. Scott Fitzerald in "Beloved Infidel," war hero "MacArthur (1977) and Abraham Lincoln in the 1982 TV miniseries "The Blue and the Grey." Gregory Peck's rare forays into the role of villains, such as a renegade son in the westerner "Duel in the Sun (1946)," and the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele in "The Boys from Brazil, (1978)" failed. Notable among his other films are: "The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952)," "On the Beach (1959)," and "The Omen (1976)." Peck's last two film roles were as maverick author Ambrose Bierce in "Old Gringo (1989)" and as the humane company owner victimised by a hostile takeover in "Other People's Money (1991)." Gregory Peck listed "Gentleman's Agreement," "Captain Horatio Hornblower," "Roman Holiday," "The Guns of Navarone," and "To Kill a Mockingbird," ("a picture closest to my heart") among his favourite movies. Commented the late Anthony Quinn, Peck's costar in "The Guns of Navarone": "He (Peck) has what Lincoln had, Reticent Majesty."

Gregory Peck married his first wife, Greta Rice in 1942. They had three sons, Jonathan, Stephen and Carey. Jonathan, a TV reporter, committed suicide at the age of 30. After an amicable divorce in 1954, Peck married Veronique Passani, a Paris reporter. They had two children, Anthony and Cecilia, both actors. Six grand children also survive Peck. From time to time in interviews, and during his one-man, audience-participation talk shows in theaters in his later years, "A conversation with Gregory Peck," Peck would admit to being a scandal-free ladies' man. The names he discreetly dropped included Ava Gardner ("a woman so beautiful that MGM crew members would stop dead in their tracks to stare as she walked by"), Sophia Loren, Greer Garson, Ingrid Bergman and Audrey Hepburn.

Asked why he was unsuccessful portraying villain, Peck replied: "I don't think I could stay interested for a couple of months in a character of mean motivation." Gregory Peck summed up his trade thus: "overacting is self-indulgence, while underacting comes either through a lack of talent or a lack of courage. An actor's obligation is to entertain, never to bore, and to perform with precision, professionalism and charm." No one was more professional, more precise, more charming, and no one more than met his obligations to entertain an adoring worldwide audience of billions than Gregory Peck!