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The Ottawa Citizen (07/Mar/1989) - To honor a star, Hollywood pays tribute to Peck at 72

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To honor a star, Hollywood pays tribute to Peck at 72

Like most of his films, Gregory Peck is aging with class and distinction.

Watching him move through a room, approached but never crushed by admirers, one senses the deep affection that people have for his films, and for the star of a long lost era of Hollywood.

Still tall, erect and dignified at age 72, Peck met reporters recently to promote his March 14 TV special, a one-hour retrospective of his film career. The NBC program will include film clips and tributes from a dinner set for Thursday in Los Angeles, where Peck will become the 17th recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute.

Peck will join an elite group of past winners that includes Alfred Hitchcock, James Stewart, Henry Fonda, James Cagney and Bette Davis. So while most of Hollywood is caught up in Oscar fever, this TV special offers a chance to rediscover an enduring talent while he is still alive, vibrant and wonderfully philosophical about it all.

"One of the things that is most rewarding about a career like mine is that here and there, there are films that play just about as well now as they did 30 years ago," Peck said, speaking in that slow, reassuring way of his. "It's nice to know that they still have a life of their own, that they can entertain and stimulate and interest people."

Peck is probably best known for the 1962 drama To Kill a Mockingbird, an unforgettable story of racial intolerance in Alabama, but other memorable films range from the light comedy of Roman Holiday to the unconventional Western saga of The Gunfighter and the post-nuclear world of On The Beach.

And for suspense fans, Peck is always linked with Hitchcock's 1945 thriller Spellbound.

Peck has not been seen much in recent years, but he says "it came as no surprise to me that I was no longer the bouncing young romantic leading man. I always knew that would happen and it happened.

"But I've accepted all that. I'm at that stage of life where I'm enjoying my life and my family and my hobbies and travel. I didn't expect to be working much after 60, or 65 for that matter, and I was quite happy with the situation. But I don't like the word 'retire.' I was always available for the right kind of material with a good part and with a character my own age."

That kind of part came up last year, and Peck will appear some time in 1989 in a theatrical movie called Old Gringo, also starring Jane Fonda and Jimmy Smits. Peck will star as Ambrose Bierce, the American satirist and misanthrope, who in his early 70s joined a Mexican revolutionary army in 1913 and vanished shortly after.

And perhaps as another reminder of his continuing vitality, Peck stood at the podium during his 45-minute session with reporters rather than taking a chair as is normally done.

"I may have made my last picture. If I have, that's OK with me," he said. "On the other hand, I may wait a year or two and get even more mellow than I am now, and another good part may come along."

The TV special, of course, is concerned with looking back, and the actor says that when he sees himself in an old movie he sees someone "who looks like a stranger.

"He looks tall and skinny and he's got dark hair. And he looks to me like a fellow who has not had too much experience in life.

"But a strange thing happens. Stored somewhere in the brain cells are recollections that come out as you look at the film. Sometimes the plot twists come as a surprise, but then when they happen I remember them, and I may even remember something the director said to me about it or something I haven't thought about for years."

Peck's films are also part of society's vast collective memory, and he says "I still get literally hundreds of letters, mostly from high school students who see To Kill a Mockingbird in their civics courses.

"To them, 1931 is ancient history, and it comes as a shock to them that a black man falsely accused of rape had very little chance of acquittal, practically none, in that part of the South."

In addition, Peck says young viewers today continue to respond to the relationship between his character, lawyer Atticus Finch, and the Finch children.

"His honesty with them, his candor with them, his treating them like adults, seems to appeal a lot to these kids that I hear from," Peck said.

Some students have been so moved by the film that they even set their life's course by it - a point of quiet pride to this hardly faded star whose work is truly worth celebrating.

"A couple of dozen times I've met young people who tell me that they became a lawyer because they saw To Kill a Mockingbird," Peck said. "That story and that character inspired them to take up the law and to do their best and to make a difference - to bring a greater measure of decency and fairness and justice into our way of life."

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