Gregory Peck dies

I thought to post this, as a small tribute to a great actor.
Even those who did not grow up watching his films like myself, would appreciate his aviation classic “Twelve O’clock High”.
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GOOD-GUY GREGORY PECK DIES

Jun 13 2003

WHAT you saw on screen is what you got. A good man of tremendous presence who spent all of his 87 years doing the right thing.

Too many ostensibly successful actors have gone to their graves unable to boast that.

But throughout a tremendous career encompassing nearly 60 movies, Gregory Peck never once compromised his principles or lost his integrity and innate decency.

He passed away at his home in Los Angeles never once having been touched by scandal.

Veronique, his second wife of nearly 50 years, was at his side and held his hand as he slipped away.

Last night, Peck’s long-term spokesman Monroe Friedman said: “It was all very peaceful. She told me: ‘I was sitting with him holding his hand and he just looked at me, closed his eyes… and he was gone.'”

He added: “He had not been ill – he was just getting older and more fragile with the passing years.

“He loved his home and his family and he was making the most of them. I would phone him to ask what he was doing, and he would say: ‘Conducting office hours around the pool.’

“He enjoyed life right up to the end. But he will be so sadly missed. He was a wonderful man.”

Peck had three children by his first wife Greta, whom he married in 1942, and two by Veronique.

A fiercely independent character, Peck was advised against such daringly liberal films as the 1947 classic Gentleman’s Agreement and his magnificent 1963 tour de force To Kill A Mockingbird.

In the first, he played a campaigning writer who goes undercover to expose anti-Semitism.

In the second, he was a white lawyer who enrages Deep South America by defending a black man accused of rape – and his screen character Atticus Finch was rightly heralded this year as the finest hero in cinema history.

The role won Peck his only Best Actor Oscar. And never an accolade more thoroughly deserved.

He said later: “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. And my feelings about racial justice and inequality and opportunity.”

Born the son of a southern Californian pharmacist in 1916, Peck emerged from a fractured childhood to exude a quiet dignity.

He was tall, extremely handsome and had a deep voice which provided his utterances with an extraordinarily profound resonance.

I grew up watching my mother and her friends go weak at the knees at the sight of this reluctant heart-throb who always rejected his status as just another product of the Tinseltown glitter factory.

He always counted Gentleman’s Agreement his favourite film. His then agent had told him in no uncertain terms: “Do not do this film. You are just establishing yourself and anti-Semitism runs very deep in this country.”

Characteristically, Peck ignored the advice and made the picture.

After he agreed to his last role, a cameo in a 1998 TV version of Moby **** – he deadpanned: “I don’t want to do – if I can avoid it – anything mediocre. It’s kind of unseemly at my age to come out in a turkey.”

There were few turkeys. He was one of those big hitters whose very presence elevated mediocre material to something special.

Many critics believe he was not at his best during his sporadic attempts at villainy. But with that I have to take issue. As the Nazi in the excellent 1978 film The Boys From Brazil, Peck succeeded in taking evilness to almost sublimely awful depths.

Despite his own misplaced reservations about his talents, he was an actor of peerless quality. And in some contrast to his heavyweight image, he starred in one the greatest romantic comedies ever: the 1953 Roman Holiday.

As the hard-nosed correspondent thrown together with the incomparable Audrey Hepburn, Peck won himself a whole new army of female fans.

And millions remember his high-profile later role in the demonic 1976 horror flick The Omen.

Peck found his vocation while he was a student in California. After college he headed for New York, where he made his Broadway debut in Morning Star.

Half a century later he recalled: “In the dressing-room I gave myself a kick and told myself: ‘Get out there.’ I was jittery for the first five minutes, and then I wasn’t jittery any more.”

The role led to his first movie, Days Of Glory, in 1943. The rest is Hollywood history.
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