Gregory Peck

Gregory Peck (April 5, 1916 – June 12, 2003) was an Oscar-winning American film actor. He was one of 20th Century Pictures most popular film stars, from the 1940s to the 1960s, and played important roles well into the 1990s. One of his most notable performances was as Atticus Finch in the 1963 film version of To Kill a Mockingbird, for which he won an Academy Award. President Lyndon Johnson honored Peck with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 for his lifetime humanitarian efforts.[1]In 1999, the American Film Institute named Peck among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time, ranking at No. 12. 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 Armenain classes in his middle age. But by then his public persona was fixed. "Gregory" is a common Indo-European name and Armenian surname (Gregorian or Krikorian) and was the name of Saint Gregory the Illuminator, Apostle of Armenia (332 AD).Peck was born Eldred Gregory Peck in San Diego, California's seaside community of La Jolla, the son of Bernice Ayres (a Missouri-born convert to Catholicism) and Gregory Peck, a chemist/pharmacist of Armenian ancestry from his grandfather Sam Peck and Irish-English paternal ancestry. Gregory's paternal grandmother, Catherine Ashe, was related to the Irish patriot Thomas Ashe, who took part in the Easter Rising less than three weeks after Peck's birth and died while on a hunger strike in 1917. Despite their strict Catholicism, Peck's parents divorced when he was five and he was raised by his grandmother.Peck was sent to a Roman Catholic military school in Los Angeles at the age of 10 and then attended San Diego High School. When he graduated, he enrolled at San Diego State University to improve his grades so that he could earn admission to his first-choice college, the University of California, Berkeley. 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 UC Berkeley, majoring in English.Since he was 6'3" and very strong, he also decided to row on the university crew. Because of his great stature, the Berkeley acting coach spotted him and decided he would be perfect for his play. He developed an interest in acting and was recruited by Edwin Duerr, director of the school's Little Theater. He went on to appear in five plays during his senior year. Although his tuition fee was only $26 a year, Peck still struggled to pay, and had to work as a "hasher" (kitchen helper) for the Alpha Gamma Delta sorority in exchange for meals. Peck would later say about Berkeley that, "it was a very special experience for me and three of the greatest years of my life. It woke me up and made me a human being." In 1997 he donated $25,000 to the Berkeley crew team in honor of his coach, Ky Ebright.After graduating from Berkeley with a BA degree in English, Peck dropped the name "Eldred" and headed to New York City 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 debut as the lead in Emlyn Williams' The 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 owing 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 at university, but 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."