With a resume that includes more than 55 films, Gregory Peck has crawled inside the skin of every sort of character. One of the most versatile actors to emerge from the Golden Age of Hollywood, Peck has played them all, and it's because he played them so convincingly that he is one of the film world's true legends.
Yet the Lincolnesque build, measured baritone voice and quiet dignity are always there, giving every character Gregory Peck's unmistakeable stamp.
When Peck strolls onto the stage of the Center for the Performing Arts Tuesday evening, he'll be playing a new role: himself.
"A Conversation With Gregory Peck," the 78–year–old star explains in a telephone interview, began with a suggestion from his good friend Cary Grant, who spent the last five years of his life traveling the country and talking about his prolific career. Movie stars very rarely get to meet and interact with the fans who conversely only know them through their work.
This is Gregory Peck's first time "on the road." And boy, is he looking forward to it.
"What it breaks down to," Peck says, "is pretty simple: first, 20 minutes to a half–hour of selected film scenes. We try to vary it so that there is some comedy, some drama and some suspense. There'll be a Western scene or two. I think it's a very entertaining mix."
The clips include, among others, Peck's classics: "Gentleman's Agreement," "Twelve O'clock High," "Roman Holiday," "The Guns of Navarone," "Cape Fear," "The Yearling," "On the Beach" and "To Kill a Mockingbird," for which he won an Academy Award in 1962.
"And then I spin yarns for half an hour, and tell anecdotes," Peck continues. "And then answer questions.
"I've been doing it off and on, invited to a college or to a film festival—so in a way, I've been working up this little show for years." (Stage to screen)
He's been working since 1944, when his first movie, "Days of Glory," went before the RKO cameras. Born in La Jolla, Calif., Eldred Gregory Peck received his dramatic training in New York City, and made his Broadway debut in 1941. He was often singled out in the theater reviews, and Hollywood soon took notice.
"I began to get movie offers," Peck recalls, "and they were all for exclusive, seven–year deals."
The young actor, however, wanted to be able to return to the theater and never signed a long–term contract with any one studio.
Peck tells a story about Leland Hayward, his high–powered Hollywood agent. "He took me to L.B. Mayer," he recalls, "and his office was the absolute prototype of a mogul's office—it was immense, and all in off–white, and a huge desk. And there was the great man. He said 'I want to put you among my family of stars,' and he said 'I want you to rise to the very top. I can see you as the brightest star of MGM.'
"Well, that was a mouthful, because they had Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, Spencer Tracy, Greer Garson, they had a bunch of people under contract there. I thought that was a little bit of an overkill." Peck explained to the most powerful man in Hollywood that he would be honored to make a picture or two at MGM, but he really wanted to keep his theater option open.
"And he went again into his pitch, he would look after me and select my roles, and guide my publicity, and nurture me. He really laid it on thick for 15 minutes. He boasted about his roster of stars, and all the glory of MGM."
Again, Peck refused. "Believe it or not, he started to cry. I couldn't believe my eyes. Tears came down his face, and he said 'Please think carefully; you may be making a terrible mistake.' The tears were dropping off his chin. Really a comic but strange, bizarre scene."
Although he was taken aback by Mayer's emotional display, Peck held firm: The theater came first.
"And with that, he mopped his face, picked up his phone and started talking business to his secretary. He ignored us.
"So we sort of backed out of the room, and when we got outside the door I said to Leland 'Well, that was something, to see a man like that cry.' And Leland said, 'Oh, he does that all the time.'"
Peck eventually signed to do four films with MGM, four with David O. Selznick, and four with Daryl Zanuck at 20th Century Fox. In 1944—he was by then one of the hottest up–and–comers in the business—he gave up Broadway for good and settled in Southern California, where he lives today with his second wife, Veronique.
Fame came early; fortune, Peck chuckles, took a while. "In those days, nobody got big money," he says. "Clark Gable never got more than $3,500 a week—and I think he had a contract for 48 weeks a year, with a month vacation. And they didn't pay him for those four weeks."
Peck averaged one or two films per year, working with such directorial luminaries as Alfred Hitchcock, William Wyler, John Huston, Raoul Walsh, King Vidor and Henry King. His leading ladies included Ingrid Bergman, Dorothy McGuire, Jane Wyman, Deborah Kerr, Lauren Bacall, Ava Gardener, Jean Simmons and, in her motion picture debut, Audrey Hepburn.
The film was 1953's "Roman Holiday." William Wyler's romantic comedy was set entirely in the Eternal City; Peck played an American newspaperman who spends a day with a European princess, who's going incognito. Peck, known until that time as primarily a dramatic actor, surprised fans with his light comedic touch.
"That was probably the happiest time making a film that I can think of," he says. "Six months in Rome; we were the first major international film to be there after the war. The Italian 'neo–realists' had been filming all over town, making some pretty great Italian films.
"We filmed all over the streets, and we always had a big, big crowd. There's a scene on the Piazza de Espana, Audrey is eating an ice cream cone and I come down and find her there. I know she's the princess, but she doesn't know I know."
The filming was taking place in an amphitheater, Peck remembers. "We had about 10,000 people at the bottom of the stairs watching us. And because of these Italian films all over the streets of Rome, they knew 'Silencio!' and 'Accione!' So they would be silent while we were speaking our lines, and they could hear us.
"Willy Wyler would say 'Cut,' and then he'd said 'Let's do it again.' And if they liked it, they'd shout 'No, no. Va bene.'Or if Wyler had liked it and said 'Print that,' they'd say 'Encore, una volta.'
"It was fun, and romantic and exciting. And funny all the time."
Throughout his career, Peck prided himself on being versatile. "Because of my stage training," he explains, "that was my ambition, not to be a movie star but to be an actor."
In 1950, Peck was named "Cowboy Star of the Year." "I had made several Westerns—'Duel in the Sun,' 'Yellow Sky,' 'The Gunfighter' and so on," he recalls.
"I bumped into John Wayne, and he kinda growled at me: 'Ah, fer Christ's sake! You—the cowboy star of the year? Who elected you to that?' And I told him it was those guys in Reno that give the Silver Spurs Award every year. He said 'Oh, Christ. You?'
"And I said 'Listen, Marion, you can't win it every year.'"
John Huston's cinematic interpretation of "Moby Dick," with Peck as stern, steely–eyed Captain Ahab, followed the light "Roman Holiday." It is one of the actor's least favorite films (he says "Only the Valiant," a low–budget 1951 Western, is his all–time worst).
While making a film that's obviously going to be bad, Peck says, "There's a matter of self–preservation involved. You try not to be in a bummer, so you try to make the ol' silk purse out of a cow's ear.
"There are times when you actually get away with it. You call on something that you can bring to it, some experience you can draw on, something you've learned about life, and you kind of inject that into a scene to give it some solid footing, some reality and truth behind it.
"Sometimes you manage to make a badly–written scene look better; you can't make it look great, but you can make it look better. And in those cases, that's your job. That's what they're paying you for."
As for his best role, Peck agrees with the 1962 Oscar voters. It was his portrayal of Southern lawyer Atticus Finch in "To Kill a Mockingbird," based on Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, that turned Gregory Peck from a great actor into a Best Actor (he had previously been nominated for "The Keys to the Kingdom," "The Yearling," "Gentleman's Agreement" and "Twelve O'clock High").
Lee's book had been sold, in pre–publication galley form, to novice filmmakers Alan J. Pakula and Robert Mulligan, who told Peck that he was their first and only choice to play Atticus. Harper Lee agreed.
They sent him the book. "I sat up most of the night, and I finished it at 2 or 3 in the morning," Peck recalls. "I called them at 8 o'clock and said 'Absolutely. I want to do it.'"
"To Kill a Mockingbird" is about a soft–spoken widower and his relationship with his two young children. When Atticus Finch accepts the thankless task of representing a black man charged with raping a white woman, his children come to respect him all the more.
Peck says he knew "Mockingbird" was a thoroughbred out of the gate. "It was instinct. I felt the emotions of the piece. I was involved. Of course, I liked what it had to say about racial bigotry, and I liked the relationship with the kids. I liked the man and what he had to say. I felt I could be him on the screen. Sometimes, they say, the hair goes up on the back of your neck—I felt it all the way through."
Production, he remembers, went by in a flash. "When we got started, we were like on a rail where we couldn't get sidetracked. We were in a kind of a state of pretending that all this was really happening, and feeling the emotions those characters felt, and speaking in character.
"And yet it was me, but I guess it was a side of me I was glad to be able to put to work in that part."
Peck spent much of the '60s working as a founding chairman of the American Film Institute, which had been created by his friend Lyndon Johnson. In hindsight, he says, he might have given too much time to the instutute's film preservation project "in the middle of my career."
His later films have ranged from historical biographies ("MacArthur") to Nazi nightmares ("The Boys From Brazil") to pulp–fiction horror ("The Omen").
"I'm a storyteller on film, is what I am," Peck explains. "My main interest was always directed toward the story as a whole, beginning, middle, end, and how I would fit into it. And further it. And hold the audience's attention."
He was given the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 1968 Oscars; the following year, Richard Nixon awarded him the Medal of Freedom.
Peck has been awarded with the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award (1989) and the Kennedy Center Honor (1991). In 1993, the actor was named to the French Legion d'Honneur.
On the screen, Peck's last starring role was in 1989's "Old Gringo," with Jane Fonda and Jimmy Smits; he played a cameo in Martin Scorsese's 1991 remake of "Cape Fear" (along with Robert Mitchum, who had co–starred with Peck in the '62 original).
Peck says he enjoyed "Like Water for Chocolate" and "Schindler's List," but most contemporary features leave him cold.
"I'm not about to knock my friends, and knock the industry in print," he relates. "I have private opinions. I'm not a crusader and I don't want to deplore the state of the art.
"I would rather put it this way: There are films being made that are purely, purely commercial, conglomerate–type films. They're product. And sometimes, because that sort of thing has been big at the box office, they will ratchet up the violence and the sex a little more each time."
In 1993, he co–starred with his daughter Cecelia and Lauren Bacall in the TV movie "The Portrait."
"I haven't been working all that much lately, but then I didn't expect to after 50 years," he says. It's like 'Fifty years already—whaddaya want?'"
Still, Peck admits, the old flame is probably burning away, somewhere within him. "I'd rather sit on the side of the road and watch the parade go by, than sit on the hill and look backwards," he says. "But there is, now and then, a hankering to jump back in the parade.
"But it has a little proviso attached: I'm not pining to go to work so much that I'll do any old thing. I won't do episodic TV.
"So if I do another one, it'll be something I think has a chance at being terrific. And if it doesn't turn out that way, well, blame it on me."