Who was Gregory Peck, the Hollywood charisma?


Charisma, beauty, sense of humor and commitment to her job and to the times she lived in, Gregory Peck he combined all the virtues of the classic Hollywood heartthrob and some more, as described in the documentary that the TCM channel premieres this June 12, coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of his death.

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Audrey Hepburn, with whom he filmed “Roman Holiday” (1953), defines him as “the most authentic actor of his time” and highlights his serenity, humility and courage at the start of “Gregory Peckthe great actorGregory PeckThe Gentleman Actor, 2022)”, directed by Grégory Maitre and which reviews his personal and artistic career.

Born in La Jolla, California, on April 5, 1916, he was raised by his grandmother following his parents’ divorce when he was five years old. He went to high school in San Diego and to college in Berkeley, where he discovered college theater.

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Gregory’s name was Eldred then, he changed his name the day he got off the train in New York to study with Lee Strasberg. He was October 1939 and he was 23 years old. He participated in productions by Molière, Strindberg or George Bernard Shaw and received movement classes with Martha Graham.

A back injury helped him escape military service. In 1942 he received rave reviews for his first major role in the play “The willow and I” and that same year he married the hairdresser Greta Kukkonen, with whom he had three children.

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One of them tells in the documentary that at that time the theater was everything for his father and that the idea of ​​working in Hollywood seemed to him to be lowered. Then he tried it and it turned out that he liked it, he explains himself. He debuted in 1944 in the war film “days of glory” with a style that is still not very polished and influenced by the theater.

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It was his next movie. “Keys to the Kingdom”, the one that truly opened the doors of cinema for him. The press fell in love with him and he earned his first Oscar nomination. David Selznick, who had initially turned him down, recruited him to shoot “Remember” by Alfred Hitchcock, alongside Ingrid Bergman.

He managed to make human and close to the cruel and unpleasant macho of “Duel in the Sun” (1946) by King Vidor, and manners and sincere, far from the typical image of the ‘cowboy’, to the protagonist of “The Gunslinger” (1950) by Henry King, with whom he filmed five other films.

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In six years he shot thirteen films and won the Golden Globe and a second Oscar nomination for “The Awakening” (1946), which led to a multiplication of his fame and a succession of tough and cultivated hero roles.

In the midst of a marital crisis, in 1952, he traveled to Europe where a film was about to change his life, the romantic comedy “Roman Holidays”, a genre that he had not tackled and in which he turned out to be very good.

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In 1955 he divorced his first wife and married French journalist Veronique Passani, with whom he had two other children. It was at that time that he began to cultivate his facet as a philanthropist and political activist. In the witch-hunt years, Peck joined his name with other artists in a manifesto to defend free speech.

He also began casting roles that embodied values ​​of justice and democracy, such as Elia Kazan’s “The Invisible Barrier,” an exposé of anti-Semitism in which he plays a journalist who poses as a Jew to experience firsthand their treatment.

Some of his most ambitious film projects are from these years, such as John Huston’s “Moby Dick” (1956) or “The Merciless Avenger” (1958), an indirect denouncement of McCarthyism directed by Henry King.

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His anti-war views in the midst of the Vietnam War earned him the enmity of Nixon. “The Final Hour” (1959), by Stanley Kramer, discredited by the US nuclear agency, was the first film about a nuclear apocalypse.

Peck used his fame in favor of the fight against cancer, illiteracy or the arts. When he read Harper Lee’s novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1960), he did it all at once in one night and the next day he began to pull the strings to shoot the film about that ideal father and lawyer willing to defend an accused black man. of rape.

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It was the perfect fusion of character and actor, it suited him like a glove, the film was released just a year before the famous march on Washington in which Martin Luther King delivered his famous speech and earned him his first Oscar.

In 1975 the great tragedy of his life occurred, the suicide of his eldest son, Jonathan. Peck returns shortly after to the filming set, from which he had moved away, with “The Prophecy” (1976), a new turn in his career, which was followed by the cruel and unprincipled character of Mengele in “The Children of Brazil” (1978).

His desire to play Lincoln was fulfilled with the miniseries “Blues and Greys” (1982) and in “The Voice of Silence” (1987) he played the president of the United States. His last role, at the age of 82, was again in “Moby Dick” (1998) but this time in a series and in the role of Father Mapple.

His remains rest in a tomb located in the crypt of the Cathedral of Los Angeles, the city where he lived and died.

Source-www.diariolibre.com