格里高利·派克

A born leader, a liberal conscience - and a Mount Rushmore jaw

Philip French
Observer.co.uk,
June 15 2003

Gregory Peck, who died on Thursday in Los Angeles at the age of 87, was one of the last of the truly great male stars who attained worldwide stardom during the Golden Age of Hollywood, the two decades following the coming of sound. This was the era dominated by the major studios who nurtured the images of their contract players and kept them full employed year by year.

The 1930s saw the rise of Edward G, Robinson, James Cagney, Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant, James Stewart and Humphrey Bogart. They were joined from the mid-Forties by Peck, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas and Charlton Heston, the last two still alive. Peck's career got going before the others because owing to a back injury (cause either by a rowing accident at the University of California or during a dancing class supervised by Martha Graham) he was unfit for military service in World War II.

Peck had a striking presence with the dark, gently waved hair, the penetrating gaze that a slight tightening of the eyelids could turn quizzical, the kindly smile, the Mout Rushmore jaw, the commanding height and the rich baritone voice. From the start he became an iconic figure for both popular audiences and middle-class intellectuals as they emerged from a horrendous war and demanded a better, fairer world.

Playing a maverick missionary priest in The Keys of the Kingdom (1944) and then an investigative journalist going undercover to expose anti-Semitism in post-war America in Gentleman's Agreement (1947) he created a screen persona that combined an unsanctimonious spiritual depth with a liberal conscience.

This sense of unaffected human decency was to be found later in one of his numerous westerns, William Wyler's The Big Country (1958), a Cold War allegory in which Peck was the mediating force between two irreconcilable opponents and, above all, as Atticus Finch, the lawyer defending an innocent black man accused of raping a white woman in the deep south in To Kill A Mockingbird (1962). It was for this role that he won an Oscar and of which he said:"It was the closest to my heart and the highest point of my career."

When he had virtually retired in the 1990s he toured America with his stage show "Conversation with Gregory Peck" and the film most often raised by the audience was Mockingbird. Numerous people told him that their vocation to become civil rights lawyers had been shaped by Peck's performance. To Kill A Mockingbird, in which the widowed Finch has two small daughters, is one of a number of films where Peck plays a father explaining the world to his children.

Offscreen, Peck was a major figure in his profession. He was a long- time governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the founder of a theatre in his Californian hometown of LaJolla, and helped create the National Endowment of the Arts. He was an outspoken opponent of McCarthyism, of nuclear weapons, of the detrimental role of corporate ownership of the media, and of the abuse of political powers, most notably president Reagan's attempt in 1987 to appoint Robert Bork, the dubiously qualified ultra right-wing jurist to the Supreme Court.

On screen, he was a born leader - King David in the Biblical epic David and Bathsheba (1951) and General Douglas MacArthur in MacArthur (1977), a striking portrait of a military commander and a man whose politics were far removed from Peck's. He was a natural to play leaders in simple-minded adventure flicks - a dashing Captain Horatio Hornblower in the 1950 film of C S Forresters nautical yarn, a tight-lipped head of the commando unit with the suicidal task of destroying a German artillery post in the eastern Mediterranean in The Guns of Navarone (1961). "Why did you pick me for this task?" Peck asks British intelligence officer James Robertson Justice, who replies (I quote from memory): "Because you speak perfect Greek, before the war you were one of the world's greatest mountaineers and you're a natural leader of men."

But Peck was not always the most perfect of citizens, though when he wasn't audiences were taken aback. Early in his career he played a charming killer and rapist in Duel in the Sun (1946), David O. Selznick's attempt to do for the Western what his Gone with the Wind had done for the Civil War. The climax in which the mortally wounded Peck and Jennifer Jones crawl towards each other over the sand is much loved by Martin Scorsese though at the time it lead to the film being dubbed "Lust in the Dust." Audiences were also shocked when Peck played the fugitive Dr. Joseph Mengele cloning little Adolf Hitlers in The Boys from Brazil (1978) in which the 62 year old Peck has a violent fight with the 71 year old Nazi-hunter Lawrence Olivier.

More interesting than these unmitigated villains were the complex men of innate decency revealed as deeply neurotic or at the end of their tether. The first such character that Peck played was the troubled hero of Hitchcock's psychological thriller Spellbound (1946), an amnesiac accused of murder and taken under the wing of psychiatrist Ingrid Bergman.

He followed this with Henry King's Twelve O' Clock High (1949), playing a tough Air Force base commander cracking up under the pressure of combat. He was equally good in the same directors The Gunfighter (1950), a trend-setting western about an ageing gunslinger cut off from his family and waiting for a younger man faster on the draw to send him to Boot Hill.

Catching the mood of the Eisenhower years in The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1956) he was a business executive oppressed by the conformity of the times and memories of his World War Two experiences in Europe. That same year Peck was somewhat disappointing as the driven Captain Ahab in John Huston's Moby Dick, apart to which Peck himself didn't think he'd done justice. Some critics opined that his performance was as wooden as his pegleg. He also wasn't so good in other literary adventures - as Dostoievsky in The Gambler (1948), as a thinly disguised Hemmingway in The Snow's of Kilimanjaro (1952), and as the dying Scott Fitzgerald in Beloved Infidel.

In one of his most neglected films, Dmytryk's Noir thriller Mirage (1965), Peck once again played an amnesiac and the film was a sharp attack on America's military-industrial complex. In his last major role in The Old Dringo (1989), he played the cynical journalist Ambrose Bierce, who in 1914 quit America and disappeared into revolution-torn Mexico to die.

Peck did not often venture into comedy for all his relaxed and graceful manner this was not his forte. Yet one of his best loved roles was that of the American reporter in William Wyler's Roman Holiday (1953), who first sets out to exploit the fugitive princess played by Audrey Hepburn, but then turns around to protect her.

His performance helped Hepburn to excel in her first major role and one of its highlights comes when he makes her think his hand has been bitten by the stone lion into whose jaws he has placed it. This scene, one of the great moments in Hollywood comedy was worked out by Peck and Whyler and sprang on the unsuspecting Hepburn. It's that rare thing in a Wyler movie - the first and only take.

Peck was a modest and kindly man and in 1989 he made a shrewd appraisal of his career. "I have made a handful of pictures that still play pretty well and are worth keeping," he said. "I have a lot of pictures that were commercially successful and, you might say, artistically spotty. And then I have a handful of turkeys."

I never actually met Peck, though I saw him at Cannes three years ago. He was there with a documentary about his life and work that he and his family had made, and he was looking old, moving slowly but still commanding attention. But back in the 1970s my wife and I were leaving a National Theatre production at The Old Vic when we came across a man stretched out in the The Cut, a sight less common then than now. We knelt down to help him and my wife was putting her folded cloak beneath his head when a familiar, sonorous voice above her asked: 'Have you taken his pulse?'

It brought back girlhood fantasies of acting as a nurse to Gregory Peck's doctor, and as she looked up there he was. Peck bent over her, took the comatose man's wrist and stated: "He's got a strong pulse. I think we should just let him sleep it off". And so we did.