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If English is your first language and you could translate my old Italian text, please contact me.
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Gregory
Peck, born in San Diego in 1916, son of a pharmacist,
became theatrical actor during his college years at Berkeley and then on the
East Coast while studying the
Stanislavski method at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse.
He debuted in cinema at the age of 28 in
Days of Glory (1944, which also marked Jacques Tourneur's directorial debut), playing a Russian partisan during World War II.
He then played an 80-year-old priest
John Stahl's
The Keys of the Kingdom (1944)
and a young industrialist who falls in love with a maid in
Tay Garnett's The Valley of Decision (1945).
Nel dopoguerra si impose come l'anti-eroe, il cittadino medio,
anonimo e mediocre ma dignitoso e giusto, in cui si riconobbe una generazione stanca di eroi.
La sua parte era quella dell'uomo qualunque coinvolto suo malgrado in
situazioni piu' grandi di lui. Nel suo comportamento di fronte all'imprevisto erano esaltati i valori morali
piu' pacifici (la famiglia, l'amicizia, la coscienza civile), piuttosto che la forza e il coraggio. Rivelato dal
medico malato e bisognoso di aiuto di Spellbound (1945,
Alfred Hitchcock)
e nel fratello malvagio di
Duel in the Sun (1946,
King Vidor),
affilo' la sua recitazione, apparentemente
monocorde in Gentleman's Agreement (1947,
Elia Kazan),
e
Paradine Case (1947, Hitchcock).
In 1947 Peck also co-founded a repertory theater, the "La Jolla Playhouse", and performed in several comedies.
Meanwhile, he continued a prolific Hollywood career with
the western Yellow Sky (1948, William Wellman),
The Great Sinner (1949, Robert Siodmak, his first collaboration with Ava Gardner),
the war movie Twelve O'clock High (1949, his first collaboration with director Henry King),
the western Gunfighter (1950, Henry King),
two Raoul Walsh swashbuckling movies (Captain Horatio Hornblowe, 1951; The World in His Arms, 1952),
the Biblical epic David and Bathsheba (1951, Henry King),
and
the Hemingway adaptation The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952, his fourth film with director Henry King, his second with actress Ava Gardner).
After two years in Europe, during which he made
Roman Holidays (1953, William Wyler), his first romantic comedy, and got remarried, he returned to Hollywood
and in 1956 played Captain Ahab in John Huston's adaptation of Herman Melville's "Moby Dick".
Then came:
the romantic comedy Designing Woman (1957, Vincent Minnelli),
the post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie On the Bench (1959, Stanley Kramer, his third with Gardner),
two movies with director
Jack Lee Thompson, namely the war movie
Guns of Navarrone (1961) and the horror movie
Cape Fear (1962),
the literary adaptation To Kill a Mocking Bird (1962, Robert Mulligan), one of his best performances,
the film noir Mirage (1965, Edward Dmytryk),
the spy-movie spoof Arabesque (1966, Stanley Donen),
and the sci-fi movie Marooned (1969, John Sturges).
Negli anni Settanta ha messo la sua maschera totemica al servizio del western,
indurendo i lineamenti in un'espressione metafica e in maestosi paesaggi desertici. Nel genere d'azione
per eccellenza ha cosi' introdotto sottili brivide esistenziali, e sempre in direzione anti-eroica:
Stalking Moon (1969, Robert Mulligan),
Shoot Out (1971, Henry Hathaway),
I Walk the Line (1970, John Frankenheimer),
Billy Two Hats (1973, Ted Kotcheff).
He finally played a despicable man in
Franklin Schaffner's
The Boys from Brazil (1978).
He was one of the Hollywood actors who adopted the Stanislavski method with
Marlon Brando and James Dean.
He died in 2003.
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