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The CNN news reported about Actor Gregory Peck, who passed away on June 12, 2003 at the age of 87 due to old age. Calculating the years since the day he has died, it is already five years and a near two months now.
'You can collect yourself and do it'
He was born Eldred Gregory Peck on April 5, 1916, in La Jolla, California. He never liked the name. "My mother had found 'Eldred' in a phone book, and I was stuck with it," he said, according to the AP. His parents divorced when their son was 6, and he spent part of his childhood traveling between each of them and his maternal grandmother.
He spent the remainder of his childhood at a Roman Catholic military academy in Los Angeles, then matriculated at the University of California at Berkeley.
An English major, he had no plans to go into acting until he was accosted by a campus director looking for a tall actor for an adaptation of "Moby Dick," the AP notes. "I don't know why I said yes," he recalled in a 1989 interview with the AP. "I guess I was fearless, and it seemed like it might be fun. I wasn't any good, but I ended up doing five plays my last year in college."
After graduation, he headed for New York, where he worked odd jobs -- including as a barker at the 1939 World's Fair -- and studying with Sanford Meisner and Martha Graham. He made his Broadway debut as the lead in Emlyn Williams' "Morning Star."
He recalled the opening night in a 1989 interview with the AP.
"In the dressing room I gave myself a kick and said, 'Get out there!' I was jittery for the first five minutes, and then I wasn't jittery anymore. You can die up there and say, 'Call it off, give 'em their money back and let 'em go home.' Or you can collect yourself and do it."
A bad back kept Peck out of World War II.
He made his film debut in 1944 with "Days of Glory," playing a Russian, and followed that with a Roman Catholic priest in "The Keys to the Kingdom," Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound" (1945) and "The Yearling." By that point, he had established himself as a major star.
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