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Gregory Peck (April 5, 1916 – June 12, 2003)
was an United States|American film actor of Irish
and Armenian Catholic extraction. 

Born Eldred Gregory Peck in La Jolla, California,
he was the son of a Missouri mother and a
chemist/pharmacist named Gregory Peck, whose
mother, Catherine Ashe, was an Ireland|Irish
immigrant from County Kerry. Ashe was related to
the Irish patriot Thomas Ashe, who took part in
the Irish Easter Rising in the year of Peck's
birth and died on hunger strike in 1917. 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,
California|Los Angeles at the age of 10. He
attended San Diego High School. When he graduated,
he went to San Diego State University, but dropped
out a year later. 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 the University of
California, Berkeley. He majored in English and
rowed on the university crew. He was recruited by
the school's Little Theater and appeared in five
plays his senior year.

After graduation, 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
theatre|Broadway debut as the lead in Emlyn
Williams' Morning Star (play)|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." 

Peck's first film was Days of Glory, released in
1944 in film|1944. Though many critics initally
dismissed Peck's acting as wooden, he was
nominated for the Academy Award for Academy Award
for Best Actor|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 U.S. Southern
States|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 Roman Holiday, in which he appeared as a
reporter alongside Audrey Hepburn in her
Oscar-winning debut. 

In 1947, while many Hollywood figures were being
blacklisted for similar activities, he signed a
letter deploring a House Un-American Activities
Committee investigation of alleged communists in
the film industry. He was outspoken against the
Vietnam War, while remaining supportive of his
son, Stephen, who was fighting there. In 1972 Peck
produced the film version of Philip Berrigan's
play The Trial of the Catonsville Nine about the
prosecution of a group of Vietnam protesters for
civil disobedience. Despite his initial reluctance
to portray the controversial General Douglas
MacArthur on screen, he did so in 1977 and ended
up with a great admiration for the man.

In 1949, Peck founded The La Jolla Playhouse, at
his birthplace, along with his friends Jose Ferrer
and Dorothy McGuire. This local community theater
and landmark (now in a new home at the University
of California, San Diego) still thrives today. It
has attracted Hollywood film stars on hiatus both
as performers and enthusiastic supporters since
its inception.

In the 1980s he moved to television, where he
starred in the mini-series The Blue and the Gray,
playing Abraham Lincoln. He also starred in the TV
film The Scarlet and The Black, about a real-life
Catholic priest in the Vatican City|Vatican who
smuggled Jews and other refugees away from the
Nazis during World War II. 

For his contribution to the motion picture
industry, Gregory Peck has a star on the Hollywood
Walk of Fame at 6100 Hollywood Blvd. In 1979, he
was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of
Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage
Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

Peck retired from active film-making in 1991,
having received a AFI Life Achievement
Award|Lifetime Achievement Award from the American
Film Institute in 1989 and Crystal Globe award for
outstanding artistic contribution to world cinema
in 1996. A lifelong supporter of the United States
Democratic Party|Democratic Party, he was
suggested in 1970 as a possible Democratic
candidate to run against Ronald Reagan for the
office of Governor of California. In an interview
with the Irish media, Peck revealed that former
President of the United States|President Lyndon
Johnson had told him that, had he sought
re-election, he intended to offer Peck the post of
US ambassador to Ireland — a post Peck, on
account of his Irish ancestry, said he might well
have taken, saying "it would have been a great
adventure". Peck encouraged his son, Cary, to run
for national political office. Cary Peck was
defeated on both accounts in Southern California,
in 1978 and in 1980, by conservative Congressman
Robert K. Dornan, first by a slim margin and later
by a much wider gap.

In 2000 he was made a Doctor of Letters by the
National University of Ireland. He was a founding
patron of the University College Dublin School of
Film, where he persuaded Martin Scorsese to become
an honorary patron. Peck also became chair of the
American Cancer Society for a short time. Like
Cary Grant did before him, Peck spent the last few
years of his life touring the world doing speaking
engagements in which he would show clips from his
movies, reminisce, and answer questions from the
audience.

He died in his sleep from natural causes at the
age of 87 in Los Angeles, California|Los Angeles.
He was survived by his second wife, Veronique
Passani, their two children, and two of his
children from his earlier marriage. His oldest
son, Jonathan, committed suicide by a single
gunshot blast to the head in 1975.

He had Catholic Armenian roots from his paternal
grandfather, Sam "Peck," an immigrant from
England. After he married his second wife,
Veronique Passani, she had his ancestry traced and
discovered the Armenian lineage. Urging him to
learn of his partial Armenian heritage and to
learn the Armenian language, he took Armenian
classes in his middle age.

==Filmography==
*Days of Glory (1944)
*The Keys of the Kingdom (1944)
*The Valley of Decision (1945)
*Spellbound (1945)
*The Yearling (1946)
*Duel in the Sun (1946)
*The Macomber Affair (1947)
*Gentleman's Agreement (1947)
*The Paradine Case (1947)
*Yellow Sky (1949)
*The Great Sinner (1949)
*Twelve O'Clock High (1949)
*The Gunfighter (1950)
*Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951)
*Only the Valiant (1951)
*Screen Snapshots: Hollywood Awards (1951) (short
subject)
*David and Bathsheba (1951)
*Pictura: An Adventure in Art (1951) (documentary)
(narrator)
*The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952)
*The World in His Arms (1952)
*Man with a Million (1953)
*Roman Holiday (1953)
*Boom on Paris (1954) 
*Night People (1954)
*The Purple Plain (1954)
*The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956)
*Moby Dick (1956)
*Designing Woman (1957)
*The Bravados (1958)
*The Big Country (1958) (also producer)
*Pork Chop Hill (1959)
*Beloved Infidel (1959)
*On the Beach (1959)
*The Guns of Navarone (1961)
*Cape Fear (1962 movie)|Cape Fear (1962)
*Lykke og krone (1962) (documentary)
*How the West Was Won (1962)
*To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
*Captain Newman, M.D. (1963)
*Behold a Pale Horse (1964)
*Mirage (1965)
*John F. Kennedy: Years of Lightning, Day of Drums
(1966) (documentary) (narrator)
*Arabesque (1966)
*Pahkahullu Suomi (1967) (Cameo)
*The Stalking Moon (1969)
*Mackenna's Gold (1969)
*The Chairman (1969)
*Marooned(1969 movie)|Marooned (1969)
*I Walk the Line (1970)
*Shoot Out (1971)
*Billy Two Hats (1974)
*The Omen (1976)
*MacArthur (film)|MacArthur (1977)
*The Boys from Brazil (1978)
*The Sea Wolves: The Last Charge of the Calcutta
Light Horse (1980)
*Sanford Meisner: The American Theatre's Best Kept
Secret (1985) (documentary)
*Directed by William Wyler (1986) (documentary)
*Amazing Grace and Chuck (1987)
*Old Gringo (1989)
*Other People's Money (1991)
*Cape Fear (1991 movie)|Cape Fear (1991)
*L'Hidato Shel Adolf Eichmann (1994) (documentary)
(narrator)
*Wild Bill: Hollywood Maverick (1996)
(documentary)
*The Art of Norton Simon (1999) (short subject)
(narrator)

== External links ==
imdb name|id=0000060|name=Gregory Peck

*http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50
070-2003Jun12.html Actor Gregory Peck Dies at 87,
Washington Post, June 12, 2003
*http://www.msnbc.com/news/921696.asp Top movie
heroes