Actors - Gregory Peck

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	Actors - Gregory Peck

Gregory Peck (April 5, 1916 – June 12, 2003) was an American film actor. He is considered to be among the most legendary film stars and handsome leading men of all time.

Early life

Born Eldred Gregory Peck in La Jolla, California, he was the son of Bernice Ayres (a Missouri-born convert to Catholicism) and Gregory Peck (a chemist/pharmacist of Irish Catholic maternal descent and English paternal ancestry). Gregory's paternal grandmother, Catherine Ashe, was related to the Irish patriot Thomas Ashe, who took part in the Easter Rising in the year of Peck's birth and died on hunger strike in 1917. Despite their strict Catholic religion, Peck's parents divorced when he was five and he was reared by his grandmother. Peck was sent to a Roman Catholic military school in Los Angeles at the age of 10. He attended San Diego High School. When he graduated, he went to San Diego State University to improve his grades so that he could earn admission to his first choice, University of California, Berkeley. For a short time, he took a job driving a truck for an oil company. In 1936, he enrolled as a pre-med student at UC Berkeley, majoring in English. Being 6'3" and very athletic, he also decided to row on the university crew. He developed an interest in acting and was recruited by the school's Little Theater and appeared in five plays his senior year. Although his tuition fee was only $26 a year, Peck still struggled to pay and had to work as a "hasher" (kitchen helper) for the Alpha Gamma Delta sorority in exchange for meals. Peck would later say about Berkeley that, "it was a very special experience for me and three of the greatest years of my life. It woke me up and made me a human being." In 1997 he donated $25,000 to the Berkeley crew team in honor of his coach, Ky Ebright.

After graduating in 1942 with a BA degree in English, Peck dropped the name "Eldred" and headed to New York City in 1939 to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse. He was often broke and sometimes slept in Central Park. He worked at the 1939 World's Fair and as a tour guide for NBC's television broadcasting. He made his Broadway debut as the lead in Emlyn Williams' Morning Star in 1942. His second Broadway performance that year was in The Willow and I with Edward Pawley. Peck's acting abilities were in high demand during World War II, since he was exempt from military service due to a back injury suffered while receiving dance and movement lessons from Martha Graham as part of his acting training. Twentieth Century Fox claimed he had injured his back while rowing a boat at university. In Peck's words, "In Hollywood, they didn't think a dance class was macho enough, I guess. I've been trying to straighten out that story for years."

Film career

Peck's first film was Days of Glory, released in 1944. Though many critics initially dismissed Peck's acting as wooden, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor five times, four of which came in his first five years of film acting: for The Keys of the Kingdom
(1944), The Yearling
(1946), Gentleman's Agreement
(1947), and Twelve O'Clock High
(1949).

Peck won the award for his fifth nomination, playing the role of Atticus Finch, a Depression-era lawyer and widowed father, in the film adaptation of the Harper Lee novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Released in 1962 during the height of the US civil rights movement in the South, this movie is said to have been Peck's favorite. In 2003, Atticus Finch was named the top film hero of the past 100 years by the American Film Institute. His other popular films include The Guns of Navarone
, the war film where he starred with David Niven and Anthony Quinn, and Roman Holiday
, in which he appeared as a reporter alongside Audrey Hepburn in her Oscar-winning debut. Peck and Hepburn were close friends until her death, and Peck even introduced her to her first husband, Mel Ferrer.

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Actors - Gregory Peck

Early life

Film career

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