Gregory Peck Was Hollywood’s Ideal Father — But He Hid His Tragedy

For 28 years, the actor America trusted to play its finest fathers carried a loss he almost never said out loud. Gregory Peck was the calm lawyer, the steady soldier, the dad who always knew what to say. The man off screen came up harder than that, a boy in La Jolla shuffled between relatives after his parents divorced, raised mostly by a grandmother who walked him to the movie house on Saturdays. From military school to a rowing seat at Berkeley to nights sleeping on a Central Park bench, he climbed toward Broadway and then to Hollywood, where four Oscar nominations came before the win. Roman Holiday, where he insisted Audrey Hepburn get equal billing. Twelve O'Clock High. Then To Kill a Mockingbird in 1962, the role that fused his name to Atticus Finch and, in 1963, finally handed him the Academy Award after seventeen years. All the while he was on location for months at a stretch, and his three sons from his first marriage learned to measure his love in phone calls and short visits. On June 26, 1975, his eldest son Jonathan, a Bay Area news reporter of 30, died by suicide while Peck was shooting in London. He flew home, buried his son, and gave the waiting press a closed door. He kept working nearly 30 more years, spoke of the loss only in fragments late in life, and died at home in Los Angeles in 2003 with Veronique Passani holding his hand. At the memorial, Brock Peters, who had played Tom Robinson opposite his Atticus, rose to eulogize the man who once defended him on screen.