格里高利·派克

Oscar winner Gregory Peck dies at 87

Friday, June 13, 2003 Posted: 1155 GMT ( 7:55 PM HKT)

(CNN) -- Actor Gregory Peck, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of upstanding Southern lawyer Atticus Finch in 1962's "To Kill a Mockingbird," has died. He was 87.

Peck died about 4 a.m. Thursday morning, spokesman Monroe Friedman said. His wife of 48 years, Veronique, was at his side.

"She told me very briefly that he died peacefully. She was with him, holding his hand, and he just went to sleep," Friedman said. "He had just been getting older and more fragile. He wasn't really ill. He just sort of ran his course and died of old age."

The character of Finch was recently named the No. 1 hero in movie history in an American Film Institute survey.

Peck was best known for roles of dignified statesmen and people who followed a strong code of ethics: a magazine reporter confronting anti-Semitism in "Gentleman's Agreement" (1947, a best picture Oscar winner), a military officer in "The Guns of Navarone" (1961), the president of the United States in "Amazing Grace and Chuck" (1987).

But he also could play against type. He was a conflicted father in the original "Cape Fear" (1962) and a Nazi in "The Boys From Brazil" (1978), the latter against Laurence Olivier's Nazi hunter.

He also gave an air of wondrous bemusement to his reporter in Audrey Hepburn's first major film, "Roman Holiday" (1953), for which Hepburn won an Oscar.

He knew his image was what resonated with moviegoers.

"Inside of all the makeup and the character and makeup, it's you, and I think that's what the audience is really interested in ... you, how you're going to cope with the situation, the obstacles, the troubles that the writer put in front of you," he told CNN.

All told, Peck was nominated for five Academy Awards. Besides "Mockingbird," he also was nominated for "The Keys of the Kingdom" (1945), "The Yearling" (1946), "Gentleman's Agreement" and "Twelve O'Clock High" (1949).

Peck's life was as dignified as his most notable film roles. He served as president of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences and was active in the Motion Picture and Television Fund, American Cancer Society, National Endowment for the Arts and other causes. His divorce from his first wife, Greta, was amicable.

A lifelong liberal activist, he even earned a place on President Nixon's enemies list.

But he played down his own work.

"I'm not a do-gooder," Peck said after learning of the academy's Jean Hersholt humanitarian award in 1968. "It embarrassed me to be classified as a humanitarian. I simply take part in activities that I believe in."
'You can collect yourself and do it'

He was born Eldred Gregory Peck on April 5, 1916, in La Jolla, California. He never liked the name. "My mother had found 'Eldred' in a phone book, and I was stuck with it," he said, according to the AP. His parents divorced when their son was 6, and he spent part of his childhood traveling between each of them and his maternal grandmother.

He spent the remainder of his childhood at a Roman Catholic military academy in Los Angeles, then matriculated at the University of California at Berkeley.

An English major, he had no plans to go into acting until he was accosted by a campus director looking for a tall actor for an adaptation of "Moby Dick," the AP notes. "I don't know why I said yes," he recalled in a 1989 interview with the AP. "I guess I was fearless, and it seemed like it might be fun. I wasn't any good, but I ended up doing five plays my last year in college."

After graduation, he headed for New York, where he worked odd jobs -- including as a barker at the 1939 World's Fair -- and studying with Sanford Meisner and Martha Graham. He made his Broadway debut as the lead in Emlyn Williams' "Morning Star."

He recalled the opening night in a 1989 interview with the AP.

"In the dressing room I gave myself a kick and said, 'Get out there!' I was jittery for the first five minutes, and then I wasn't jittery anymore. You can die up there and say, 'Call it off, give 'em their money back and let 'em go home.' Or you can collect yourself and do it."

A bad back kept Peck out of World War II.

He made his film debut in 1944 with "Days of Glory," playing a Russian, and followed that with a Roman Catholic priest in "The Keys to the Kingdom," Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound" (1945) and "The Yearling." By that point, he had established himself as a major star.
A star for nearly six decades

"From his debut, Peck was always a star and rarely less than a major box-office success," writes David Thomson in the New Biographical Dictionary of Film. In his roles, "he is a protagonist for middle American aspirations, pathfinder for the straight and narrow ... [he] never succumbs to the awful doubts that drag down Gary Cooper."

"Gentleman's Agreement" was considered a bold film in its day, tackling controversial subject matter. According to the AP, Peck commented in 1971 that his agent cautioned him: "You're just establishing yourself, and a lot of people will resent the picture. Anti-Semitism runs very deep in this country."

Peck ignored his advice.

He ranked "Gentleman's Agreement" as one of his personal favorites, along with "Captain Horatio Hornblower" (1951) and "The Guns of Navarone." But he had a special place in his heart for "To Kill a Mockingbird."

In the film, based on the award-winning Harper Lee novel, Peck played a small-town Southern lawyer who defies public sentiment to defend a black man accused of rape.

"I put everything I had into it -- all my feelings and everything I'd learned in 46 years of living, about family life and fathers and children," he told the AP in 1989. "And my feelings about racial justice and inequality and opportunity."

His knightly image gave rise to frequent rumors that he would run for political office, particularly after Ronald Reagan defeated Pat Brown in the 1966 California governor's race. But Peck wouldn't have it.

"I never gave a thought to running," Peck always replied. "Not even in my heart of hearts do I have an ambition to do that."

With Greta Peck, he had three sons, Jonathan, Stephen and Carey; Jonathan, a TV reporter, committed suicide at the age of 30. The star married Veronique Passani, a Paris reporter, in 1954. They had two children, Anthony and Cecilia, both actors.

格里高利·派克

An actor who combined heroic style with liberal conviction

Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
The Guardian,
June 13 2003

When there was talk earlier this year of the Oscars being postponed because of the war in Iraq, there were many references to a previous cancellation, in 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King.

The then president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who announced the postponement, said that it was "the only appropriate gesture of respect" and made it clear that a film awards ceremony paled beside the tragedy of Dr King's death.

The president was Gregory Peck, whose espousal of liberal causes and opposition to racism and anti-semitism were reflected in a number of roles he played.

Throughout his life, he always stressed that his roles on screen were just parts that he played and did not compare with the true heroics of such men as Dr King whom he admired so much.

Now he has died, aged 87, fellow members of the industry around the world have paid tribute both to his body of work and his modest and laconic style.

Peck was already in his mid-20s when he finally decided to embark on a career in acting. Born in southern California, in La Jolla, his father was a pharmacist of Irish descent, who separated from his mother when Peck was only six. He spent part of his childhood at a Roman Catholic military academy.

He graduated from San Diego state college and headed on to Berkeley to study English. Having decided to try his luck on the stage, he moved east and made his debut in The Morning Star by Emlyn Williams with the New York Neighbourhood Playhouse in 1942.

Because of a spinal injury suffered as a student during a rowing accident, Peck was excused military service and was thus on hand when Hollywood needed to fill the gaps left by some of their stars who had joined up.

It was his second film, The Keys of the Kingdom, made in 1944, that was to turn him into a star. He played the part of a Scottish priest - he always made much of his Celtic background - working as a missionary in China. It drew Peck to the filmgoing public's attention when he was nominated for an Oscar, the first of five nominations.

During the 1940s, Peck was active in organisations that were sometimes later denounced as communist fronts. He was a member of the Hollywood Democratic Committee, formed in 1943 to give backing to Roosevelt, and his commitment to the liberal wing of the Democratic party remained. One of his more controversial roles was that of a journalist who pretends to be Jewish to experience anti-semitism first hand in the 1947 film, Gentleman's Agreement. He took the role although his agent warned him: "You're just establishing yourself and a lot of people will resent the picture. Anti-semitism runs deep in this country." It won Peck an Oscar nomination.

It was not until his fifth nomination for To Kill A Mockingbird, the 1962 film with which he is perhaps most closely associated, that Peck was finally to win an Oscar. The film came at a time when equal rights were still far from accepted in the southern states, and Peck always said that he was proud to have played such a part as that of Atticus Finch, who challenges the jury in the trial to face down racism.

Some of his admirers wanted him to run against Ronald Reagan when the latter ran for a second term as governor of California but Peck made it clear that he would not welcome that sort of a role, although he had often been involved in political campaigns.

His acting range was wide: from Captain Horatio Hornblower in the 1951 film of that name to General Douglas MacArthur in MacArthur, and from the Nazi Josef Mengele in The Boys from Brazil in 1978 to novelist F Scott Fitzgerald in Beloved Infidel in 1959. His career was long enough to allow him to appear in two versions of Moby Dick, more than 40 years apart, the second a television version in which he had a cameo role.

Other notable films included everything from The Guns of Navarone to Arabesque, Cape Fear to The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. His career included fewer dud films than many other actors of his generation, not least because he was discerning about what sort of parts he would take. Off-screen, he was active on both the arts and health issues. He was at one time chairman of the American Cancer Society.

In 1942, Peck married his first wife, Greta. They had three children, Jonathan, a television and radio journalist who committed suicide at 30, Stephen, and Carey. The couple divorced in 1954. Peck then married Veronique Passani, a French journalist. They had two children, Anthony and Cecilia.

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.