Eldred Gregory Peck

Eldred Gregory Peck
Eldred Gregory Peck was born in La Jolla, California, United States on April 5, 1916. He was the son of Bernice Mary and Gregory Pearl Peck, a chemist and druggist in San Diego. He had Irish, English and some German ancestry. His parents divorced when he was only five years old. He was the only child and sent to live with his grandmother. His childhood was not stable. His grandmother took him to the movies every week and his dog, followed him everywhere. He studied pre-medical at UC-Berkeley. He enrolled in the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and debuted on Broadway after graduation. His debut was in Emlyn Williams' play "The Morning Star" released in 1942. In 1943, he was in Hollywood, where he debuted in the RKO film Days of Glory in 1944. In the same year, he appeared in "The Keys of the Kingdom" for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. He was tall and heroic. In 1945, he appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound as an amnesia victim accused of murder. In The Yearling, he was again nominated for an Academy Award and won the Golden Globe. He was effective in westerns and appeared in such varied as David O. Selznick's critically blasted Duel in the Sun in 1946, in Yellow Sky in 1948 and the acclaimed The Gunfighter in 1950. He was nominated again for the Academy Award for his roles in Gentleman's Agreement (1947), and Twelve O'Clock High (1949), a story of high-level stress in an Air Force bomber unit in World War II. With a string of hits to his credit, he made decision to appear only in films that interested him. He continued to appear as the hero in such films as Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N. (1951) and Moby Dick (1956). He worked with Audrey Hepburn in her debut film, Roman Holiday (1953). He finally won the Oscar, after four nominations, for his performance as lawyer Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). In the early 1960s, he appeared in two darker films than he usually made, Cape Fear (1962) and Captain Newman, M.D. (1963), which dealt with the way people live. He also gave a powerful performance as Capt. Keith Mallory in The Guns of Navarone in 1961, one of the biggest box-office hits of that year. In the early 1970s, he produced two films, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1972) and The Dove (1974). He made a comeback playing, Robert Thorn in the horror film The Omen in 1976. After that, he returned to the bigger-than-life roles he was best known for, such as MacArthur (1977) and the monstrous Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele in the huge hit The Boys from Brazil (1978). In the 1980s, he moved into television with the mini-series The Blue and the Gray (1982) and The Scarlet and the Black (1983). In 1991, he performed in the remake of his 1962 film, Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear. He was also cast as the progressive-thinking owner of a wire and cable business in Other People's Money (1991). In 1967, he received the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. He was also been awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died in June 2003 in Los Angeles, California, United States.