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Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient Gregory Peck
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Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient Gregory Peck
CITATION
GREGORY PECK
Awarded by
President Lyndon B. Johnson
January 20, 1969
An artist who has brought new dignity to the actor's profession, Gregory Peck has enriched the lives of millions. He has given his energies, his talents, and his devotion to causes which have improved the lives of people. He is a humanitarian to whom Americans are deeply indebted.
Gregory Peck being congratulated by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton
A mong the celebrated pantheon of Hollywood royalty, few are as well-respected and universally adored as Gregory Peck. For more than fifty years, he has been a major presence in the theater, on television, and most importantly, on the big screen. For many, Peck is a symbol of the American man at his best - a pillar of moral courage and a constant defender of traditional values. As General MacArthur, Melville's Captain Ahab, and Atticus Finch, he has presented audiences with compelling stories of strength and masculinity.
Eldred Gregory Peck was born in 1916, and spent most of his early life in and around La Jolla, California. By the time he was six, his parents had divorced. His mother married a travelling salesman and was often away with her new husband, while his father, a local pharmacist, spent much of the time working the night-shift. For a number of years he lived with his maternal grandmother, but at the age of ten was sent to St. John's Military Academy in Los Angeles. The four years he spent there were important in forming his sense of personal discipline. There he also began to acquire a sensitivity to the social importance of authority figures - a topic that has remained important throughout his career. After the Academy, he returned to live with his father, and to attend public high school.
After graduating, Peck enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley. Greatly influenced by his father's desires for him to be a doctor, Peck began as a pre-med student. By the time he was a senior, however, he found his real interests to be in writing and acting. Initially drawn to the communal, almost familial, aspects of the theater, Peck soon realized that he had a natural gift as both an expressive actor and a storyteller. After graduating in 1939, he changed his name from Eldred to Gregory and moved to New York. There, his abilities were almost immediately recognized. Within a year he began to fill small roles in travelling shows and in 1942, made his debut on Broadway with "The Morning Star." Though many of his early plays were doomed to short runs, it seemed clear that Peck was destined for something bigger. In 1944 that "something bigger" arrived in the form of his first two Hollywood roles, as Vladimir in "Days of Glory" and Father Francis Chisholm in "Keys to the Kingdom."
While "Days of Glory" was coolly received, his role as the taciturn Scottish missionary in "The Keys of the Kingdom" was a resounding triumph and brought him his first Oscar nominations for Best Actor. This early success provided him the rare opportunity of working with the best directors in Hollywood. Over the next three years he appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound," (1945) King Vidor's "Duel in the Sun," (1946) and Elia Kazan's "Gentleman's Agreement" (1947). More than any other of his early roles, it was as Phil Green in the ground-breaking depiction of American anti-Semitism, "Gentleman's Agreement," that solidified his image as a man of great moral conviction. Despite concerns over public acceptance of the project, it surprised many by winning an Oscar for Best Picture and a nomination for Best Actor. This success seemed not only a validation of Peck's abilities as an artist but of his moral convictions as well.
Though an amiable and fun-loving man at home, Peck's stern presence made him one of the screen's great patriarchs. Tough and caring, he was the quintessential mid-century American man - the good-looking romantic lead across from Audrey Hepburn as well as the rugged World War II bomber commander. For many, the actor and the characters he portrayed were inseparable; the authority of his passionate yet firm demeanor was attractive to post-war Americans who longed for a more stable time.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Peck continued to challenge himself as an actor, appearing in thrillers, war films, westerns and in his best known film, "To Kill A Mockingbird. " Based on the book by Harper Lee, "To Kill A Mockingbird" addresses problems of racism and moral justice in personal and powerful ways. As Atticus Finch, a lawyer in a small Southern town, Peck created a character that remains a great example of an individual's struggle for humanity within deeply inhumane conditions. It seems clear however, that the reason for Peck's constant assertion that "To Kill A Mockingbird" is his best (and favorite) film, was the film's attention to the lives of children and the importance of family. From "The Yearling"(1946) to "Cape Fear" (1962) familial concern has been the underlying structure from which his greatest characters have grown.
While continuing to act on television and in Hollywood throughout the 1980s and 1990s, including a remake of "Cape Fear" (1991), Peck has focused much of his energy on spending time with his wife, children, and grandchildren. For Peck, life as a father and as a public figure have been inseparable-; he was simultaneously a major voice against the Vietnam War, while remaining a patriotic supporter of his son who was fighting there. If years of breathing life into characters such as Captain Keith Mallory and General MacArthur taught him anything, it was that life during wartime was profoundly complex; and rarely has there been a time free from war or struggle. In his more than fifty films, Peck has continually attempted to investigate these complex struggles, and in doing so has created a library of stories that shed light on human possibility and social reality.
At 85, Peck turned his attention back to where he got his start, the stage. He traveled the country visiting small play houses and colleges, speaking about his life and experiences as a father, a celebrity, and as an actor.
Gregory Peck passed away on June 12th, 2003, at the age of 87.
Gregory Peck holds his Golden Globe Award during an awards ceremony in Beverly Hills in 1999.
Gregory Peck in The Omen
Born Eldred Gregory Peck in La Jolla, California in 1916, Gregory Peck was the epitome of the tall, dark, and handsome leading man. Stalwart, dependable and always dignified, Peck was a free agent untrapped by the studio system and able to move from genre to genre with ease, appearing successfully in comedies, dramas, westerns, epics, and action pictures.
He gravitated toward the steadfast hero types, which worked out fine from an audience perspective. There was something comforting, after all, in knowing that Peck would be around the make things right.
The 6'3" Peck didn't set out to become an actor; he was pre-med at UC Berkeley when he was recruited by the director of the drama department, which was suffering from a shortage of tall men that year. It would not be the last time Peck would benefit from such shortages. The acting bug bit hard-he did five plays at Berkeley, changed his major to English, and graduated to New York to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse.
He made his Broadway debut in 1942s "The Morning Star," and shortly thereafter left for Hollywood. Unable to serve in the Armed Forces in World War II because of a spinal injury incurred in a college rowing match, Peck stepped into the vacuum created by the absence of so many leading men and quickly became one of the biggest draws in Hollywood.
He made his debut in Days of Glory (1944) and received an Oscar nod for his very next performance, as a priest in The Keys of the Kingdom (1945). For four decades Peck continued to turn in finely crafted performances, working with the best directors in Hollywood (including Hitchcock, Kazan, Huston, Wellman, Wyler, Ford, Frankenheimer, and Scorcese) on projects that included Spellbound (1945), The Yearling (1946) Gentleman's Agreement (1947), The Gunfighter , Twelve O'Clock High (1950), Roman Holiday (1953), Moby Dick (1956), The Big Country (1958), The Guns of Navarone (1961), Cape Fear , How the West Was Won (1962), Arabesque (1966), The Omen (1976), The Boys from Brazil (1978) and Old Gringo (1989). In 1962 after four nominations, Peck took home an Oscar for his most memorable role, that of the ethical Southern lawyer Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird . To Kill A Mockingbird (1962) Atticus Finch delivers his Closing Argument at the Trial of Tom Robinson.
Truly one of Hollywood's leading citizens, Peck has long been an active participant in the film community and worker for charitable institutions (serving as National Chairman of the American Cancer Society.) In 1969 he was presented with the nation's highest civilian award, The Presidential Medal of Freedom . Retired from acting, he made a cameo appearance in the 1998 TV production "Moby Dick" and was filmed for the 1999 documentary "Conversations with Gregory Peck," based on Peck's traveling series of lectures on life in Hollywood.
To Kill A Mockingbird The Big Country
June 12, 2003 -- Gregory Peck, the lanky, handsome movie star whose long career included such classics as “Roman Holiday,” “Spellbound” and his Academy Award winner, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” has died, a spokesman said Thursday. He was 87.
PECK died overnight, Monroe Friedman said.
Peck’s craggy good looks, grace and measured speech contributed to his screen image as the decent, courageous man of action.
He was born in La Jolla, California, on April 5, 1916, and was given the name of Eldred Gregory Peck. “My mother had found ‘Eldred’ in a phone book, and I was stuck with it,” he said.
His mother was a lively Missourian, his father was a quiet druggist, son of an Irish immigrant mother. His parents divorced when their son was 6. His next two years were divided between them, then he spent two years with his maternal grandmother in La Jolla. At 10 he was shipped off to a Roman Catholic military academy in Los Angeles where he was indoctrinated by “tough Irish nuns and square-jawed ROTC officers.”
Peck majored in English at the University of California at Berkeley and rowed on the crew. One day he was accosted by the director of the campus little theater who said he was looking for a tall actor for an adaptation of “Moby Dick.”
“I don’t know why I said yes,” he recalled in a 1989 interview. “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.”
Dropping the name of Eldred, he headed for New York after graduation with $195 in his pocket. He studied with Sanford Meisner and Martha Graham, worked as a barker at the 1939 World’s Fair and as a tour guide at NBC. After summer stock and a tour with Katherine Cornell in “The Doctor’s Dilemma,” he made his Broadway debut is the lead in Emlyn Williams’ “Morning Star.”
A half-century later he remembered opening night:
“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.”
The play flopped, but Peck’s performance brought interest from Hollywood. He accepted a modest film, “Days of Glory,” a story of Russian peasants during the Nazi invasion, mostly to use the $10,000 salary to pay off his dentist and other creditors. Then Darryl Zanuck offered him “Keys of the Kingdom.”
Soon Peck was under non-exclusive contracts to four studios; he refused an exclusive pact with MGM despite Louis B. Mayer’s tearful pleading. With most of the male stars absent in the war, the studios desperately needed strong leading men. Peck was exempt from service because of an old back injury.
From his film debut on, he was never less than a star. He was nominated for an Oscar five times, and his range of roles was astonishing.
He portrayed a priest in “Keys of the Kingdom,” combat heroes in “Twelve O’Clock High” and “Pork Chop Hill,” Westerners in “Yellow Sky” and “The Gunfighter,” a romantic in “Roman Holiday.” His commanding presence suited him for legendary characters: King David in “David and Bathsheba,” sea captains in “Captain Horatio Hornblower” and “Moby Dick,” F. Scott Fitzgerald in “Beloved Infidel,” the war leader “MacArthur,” and Abraham Lincoln in the TV miniseries “The Blue and the Grey.”
Peck’s rare attempts at unsympathetic roles usually failed. He played the renegade son in the Western “Duel in the Son” and the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele in “The Boys from Brazil.”
Critics could be unkind. Pauline Kael of the New Yorker once labeled Peck “competent but always a little boring.”
Off-screen as well as on, Peck conveyed a quiet dignity. He had one amicable divorce, and scandal never touched him.
PECK FOR GOVERNOR?
Peck, who also produced a number of movies, made big contributions as a civic leader in the film industry, serving as a founding chairman of the American Film Institute and as a president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In March 1987 he was among cultural and scientific luminaries invited to Moscow for then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s forum “For a Nuclear-Free World and the Survival of Mankind.”
A charter member of the National Arts Council, Peck was also a driving force behind the AFI and served from 1967 to 1970 as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which later awarded him its Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson awarded Peck the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian award.
Asked once by an interviewer to sum up his career, Peck replied with typical reserve: “I enjoy practicing my craft as well as I possibly can. I enjoy the work for its own sake.”
“I’m not a do-gooder,” he insisted after learning of the Hersholt award in 1968. “It embarrassed me to be classified as a humanitarian. I simply take part in activities that I believe in.”
A Roosevelt New Dealer, Peck campaigned for Harry Truman in 1948 “at a time when nobody thought he had a chance to win.”
He continued championing liberal causes, producing an anti-Vietnam War film in 1972, “The Trial of the Cantonsville Nine” and helping the campaign against the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987.
Rumors arose periodically that Peck planned to run for office. They started when Ronald Reagan defeated Edmund G. “Pat” Brown for governor of California in 1966. Brown cracked: “If they’re going to run actors for governor, maybe the Democrats should have run Greg Peck.”
“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.”
In 1954, Peck divorced his first wife, Greta Rice, with whom he had three sons, Jonathan, Stephen and Carey. Jonathan, a TV reporter and Peck’s eldest child, committed suicide in 1975, causing him great grief.
In 1955 he married French journalist Veronique Passani Peck, with whom he had two more children, Anthony and Cecilia, both actors.
DIED PEACEFULLY
Peck died at his Los Angeles home overnight, with Veronique at his side, Friedman said.
“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.”
During his first five years in films, Peck scored four Academy Award nominations as best actor: “Keys of the Kingdom” (1944), “The Yearling” (1946), “Gentleman’s Agreement” (1947), “Twelve O’Clock High” (1949).
“Gentleman’s Agreement,” in which he played a magazine writer who poses as a Jew to expose anti-Semitism, was considered a daring film in its time. 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. “Gentleman’s Agreement” proved a moneymaker and won the Oscar as best picture.
The actor listed “Gentleman’s Agreement” among his favorites of his movies. The others: the sea adventure “Captain Horatio Hornblower”; “Roman Holiday” in which he played a reporter to Audrey Hepburn’s princess; “The Guns of Navarone” (“good, all-out entertainment, though it’s really a comedy”); and “To Kill a Mockingbird” - for which he won his only Oscar for best actor in 1963.
He played Atticus Finch, 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 remarked in 1989. “And my feelings about racial justice and inequality and opportunity.”
In 2003, an American Film Institute listing of the top heroes in film history ranked Peck’s Finch as No. 1.
In his 60s and 70s, movie roles grew sparse. He appeared as a U.S. president in “Amazing Grace and Chuck” (1987), maverick author Ambrose Bierce in “Old Gringo” (1989) and as a humane company owner victimized by a hostile takeover in “Other People’s Money” (1991).
In 1993 he starred in a made-for-TV movie, “The Portrait,” with Lauren Bacall, his co-star of “Designing Woman” (1957), and his daughter Cecilia. The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
"The Gunfighter" (1950) with Gregory Peck
Duel In The Sun
Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holidays
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Medal History
