The Gregory Peck Only We Knew

FAMILY AND FRIENDS RECALL A MAN WHO WAS AS STRONG AND PRINCIPLED AS THE CHARACTERS HE PLAYED

- LOUISE A. BARILE

In Roman Holiday, Audrey Hepburn's woozy runaway princess asks Gregory Peck's American reporter Joe to help her undress. "I've never been alone with a man before," she sweetly slurs. Instead of taking advantage of the situation, Joe hands her a pair of his own pajamas and says he's going out for coffee. “You're sleeping on the couch, not the bed,” he warns her.

In a career that spanned a half-century, Gregory made a specialty of playing gentlemen of dignity and strong moral character, like Joe or Atticus Finch, his Oscar-winning role in To Kill a Mockingbird. “There's a quiet power in his being that is almost awesome,” Angie Dickinson once said. Yet in his private life, Gregory knew personal sorrow and struggled to live up to his own high expectations. The suicide death of a son in 1975 left him wracked by feelings of regret and guilt. “If I had been here in Los Angeles, he would most certainly have called me,” said the star, who was in Europe with his wife, a native of France, at the time.