Gregory Peck: biography, news, photos and videos

Born in La Jolla, California, Gregory Peck discovered a keen interest in acting while in school. After graduating, he moved to New York City and studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse, a renowned acting school. In 1942, he made his mark on Broadway in Emlyn Williams' The Morning Star. Two years later, he arrived in Hollywood with four contracts under his belt. Director Jacques Tourneur gave him his first film role, as Captain Vladimir in Days of Glory, for the independent production company RKO. That same year, he starred in Tay Garnett's The Valley of Judgment and John M. Stahl's The Keys to the Kingdom, where he earned his first Oscar nomination for his role as Father Francis Chisholm. In 1945, Alfred Hitchcock called upon his acting talents to play an amnesiac accused of murder in his thriller The House of Dr. Edwards, opposite Ingrid Bergman. Alongside his roles as strong, heroic men in the westerns The Forsaken City (1948) by William Wellman, The Human Target (1950) by Henry King and the flamboyant Duel in the Sun (1946) by King Vidor, Gregory Peck reinforced his image as a moral man by playing the character of Philip Schuyler Green in The Invisible Wall, a description of American anti-Semitism written by Elia Kazan in 1947. During the following decade, the actor did not hold back from varying the registers by lending his features to the adventurer writer in The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) by Henry King, to the romantic partner of Audrey Hepburn in the comedy Roman Holiday by William Wyler, to the tyrannical Captain Ahab in Moby Dick (1956) by John Huston or even to a former marine captain wishing to settle in the West in the western The Great Outdoors.(1958) by William Wyler. In 1962, Gregory Peck won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as Atticus Finch, a lawyer in a small town in the American South in the 1930s who defends a young black man accused of raping a white woman in Robert Mulligan's To Kill a Mockingbird. That same year, he played opposite a terrifying Robert Mitchum in Jack Lee Thompson's thriller The Nerves, which was remade by Martin Scorsese in 1991, in which the original actors made appearances in supporting roles. After a slight slowdown in his career between the late 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, he returned to success with one of the leading roles in Richard Donner's horror film The Omen (1976), where he played the father of Damien, the Antichrist, then the following year by playing American general Douglas MacArthur in the historical film MacArthur, the Rebel General under the direction of Joseph Sargent. In 1978, director Franklin J. Schaffner convinced Gregory Peck to play on the big screen the macabre Josef Mengele, a former Nazi doctor at the Auschwitz extermination camp known for the pseudo-medical experiments he carried out on prisoners during World War II, in the thriller Those Boys Who Came from Brazil. During the 1980s, he moved from the big screen to the small screen, playing the role of Abraham Lincoln in the American television series The Blue and the Gray, then that of the Catholic priest Hugh O'Flaherty who saves Jews and refugees from Nazism during the second world war in the television film The Purple and the Black. Gregory Peck spent the last years of his life traveling the world, giving speeches and conferences before dying in his sleep on June 12, 2003 in Los Angeles, at the age of 87. WB