Date: 13th June 2003

Gregory Peck dies


Gregory Peck has died aged 87.

The star's long career included such classics as Roman Holiday, Spellbound and his Academy Award winner To Kill A Mockingbird.

He made his film debut in 1944 and was nominated for an Oscar five times.

An amazing variety of roles included roles as combat heroes in Twelve O'Clock High and Pork Chop Hill, sea captains in Captain Horatio Hornblower and Moby Dick and Abraham Lincoln in the TV mini-series The Blue and the Grey.

Rare attempts at unsympathetic roles included a renegade son in the Western Duel in the Son and the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele in The Boys from Brazil.

He served as president of the Motion Picture Academy and was active in the Motion Picture and Television Fund, American Cancer Society, National Endowment for the Arts and other causes.

"I'm not a do-gooder," he insisted after learning of the Academy's Jean Hersholt humanitarian award in 1968. "It embarrassed me to be classified as a humanitarian. I simply take part in activities that I believe in."

Source: Press Release