Gregory Peck (
April 5,
1916 –
June 12,
2003) was an
Academy Award-winning and four-time
Golden Globe Award-winning
American film actor. He was one of
20th Century Fox's 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 1962 film version of
To Kill a Mockingbird, for which he won his
Academy Award. President
Lyndon Johnson honored Peck with the
Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 for his lifetime
humanitarian efforts.
[Gregory Peck Medal of Freedom.] In 1999, the
American Film Institute named Peck among the
Greatest Male Stars of All Time, ranking at #12.
Early life
Peck was born
Eldred Gregory Peck in
San Diego, California's seaside community of
La Jolla, the son of
Missouri-born Bernice Mae "Bunny" (
née Ayres) and Gregory Pearl Peck, who was a chemist and pharmacist. Peck's father was of English (paternal) and Irish (maternal) heritage,
[Freedland, Michael. Gregory Peck: A Biography. New York: William Morrow and Company. 1980. ISBN 0688036198 p.10][United States Census records for La Jolla, California 1910] and his mother was of Scots (paternal) and English (maternal) ancestry.
[United States Census records for St. Louis, Missouri - 1860, 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910] Peck's father was a
Catholic and his mother converted upon marrying his father. Peck's Irish-born paternal grandmother, Catherine Ashe, was related to
Thomas Ashe, who took part in the
Easter Rising less than three weeks after Peck's birth and died while on
hunger strike in 1917. Peck's parents divorced by the time he was six years old and he spent the next few years being raised by his grandmother.
[Freedland, pp. 12-18]
