Gregory Peck: Age, Wife, Children, Net Worth & Movies

Some actors play heroes. Gregory Peck made audiences believe he simply was one. Tall, calm and deep-voiced, he played lawyers, captains and fathers who did the right thing even when it cost them, and he played them with such quiet conviction that people trusted the man as much as the characters.

That trust was not an act, or not only an act. Peck spent his life on the causes his films stood for, and he carried the same dignity into old age that he had carried onto the screen in the 1940s.

He lived to 87, married twice, fathered five children, and left one performance — Atticus Finch — that the American Film Institute ranked above every other hero in film history. This is his story, from La Jolla to that Alabama courtroom.

Quick Facts

Detail	Information
Full Name	Eldred Gregory Peck
Born	April 5, 1916
Died	June 12, 2003, aged 87
Birthplace	La Jolla, California, USA
Nationality	American
Occupation	Actor
Spouse	Greta Kukkonen, Veronique Passani
Children	5, including Cecilia Peck
Net Worth	About $40 million at death, as estimated by Celebrity Net Worth

What Was Gregory Peck’s Childhood Like in La Jolla?

Eldred Gregory Peck was born on April 5, 1916, in La Jolla, California, a coastal community that is now part of San Diego. His father, Gregory Pearl Peck, was a chemist and pharmacist. His mother was Bernice Mae Ayres.

His parents divorced when he was about five years old, and the break shaped his childhood. Peck was raised largely by his grandmother, and he later spoke of a lonely boyhood spent moving between households. He was sent for a time to a Catholic military school in Los Angeles, an experience that gave a shy boy structure, if not much warmth.

School eventually led him to the University of California, Berkeley. He arrived intending to study medicine, rowed for the university, and slowly discovered that acting interested him far more than anatomy. Money was short, and he worked his way through college, but the direction of his life had quietly changed.

He graduated from Berkeley in 1939 and headed for New York with very little money and a new ambition. He had also been given a useful piece of advice along the way: drop “Eldred.” From then on, he was Gregory Peck.

How Did Gregory Peck Become an Actor?

In New York, Peck studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse and worked with the celebrated teacher Sanford Meisner. He also trained with dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, and it was during a dance workshop with Graham that he injured his back.

That back injury changed the course of Hollywood history. It kept him out of military service during World War II, at a time when many of the industry’s leading men were away in uniform. A tall, handsome, serious young actor with a wonderful voice was suddenly in unusual demand.

Peck worked on stage first, appearing on Broadway in the early 1940s, before Hollywood called. He signed an unusual arrangement that split his services between 20th Century Fox and producer David O. Selznick, and made his film debut in Days of Glory in 1944.

Many actors of his dignity-first generation owed something to the example of Spencer Tracy, who had shown that understatement could hold a screen. Peck belonged to that same school of restraint, and Hollywood noticed him almost at once.

How Did The Keys of the Kingdom Make Gregory Peck a Star?

Peck’s second film made him. In The Keys of the Kingdom in 1944 he played a humble Scottish priest who spends his life in missionary work in China, growing old on screen across the decades of the story. He was only 28, playing a man into old age, and he carried it completely.

The performance earned him his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. It was the first of four nominations in five years, a run that announced a major new talent: The Yearling followed, then Gentleman’s Agreement, then Twelve O’Clock High.

Gentleman’s Agreement in 1947 was more than a hit. Peck played a journalist who poses as Jewish to expose anti-Semitism, and the film won the Academy Award for Best Picture. It set the pattern for his career. When Hollywood wanted to say something serious about conscience, it called Gregory Peck.

By the end of the 1940s he was one of the most respected actors in the world, able to move between westerns such as The Gunfighter, war films, and literary drama without ever seeming miscast. The Oscar itself, though, kept waiting.

What Were Gregory Peck’s Greatest Movies of the 1950s?

The 1950s broadened him. In Roman Holiday in 1953 he played an American reporter in Rome who finds a runaway princess, played by a young Audrey Hepburn in her breakthrough role. Peck, already the star, insisted that Hepburn receive equal billing, a generous gesture that helped launch one of the great careers of the century.

He played Captain Ahab in Moby Dick in 1956, bringing his gravity to John Huston’s adaptation of Melville. He made westerns, including The Big Country, and adventure films that played to enormous audiences around the world.

One famous role got away from him. Peck turned down the part of Marshal Will Kane in High Noon, feeling it was too close to his own The Gunfighter, and the role went to Gary Cooper, who won an Oscar for it. Peck later admitted, honestly and in public, that he had made a mistake — though he also said he doubted he could have played it as well as Cooper.

How Did Gregory Peck Become Atticus Finch?

In 1962 Peck played the role that would define him forever. To Kill a Mockingbird, adapted from Harper Lee’s novel, cast him as Atticus Finch, a widowed lawyer in a small Alabama town who defends a Black man falsely accused of a terrible crime.

Peck’s performance is built out of stillness. Atticus does not shout or posture. He reasons, he waits, and he treats everyone in that courtroom with a courtesy the situation does not deserve. His closing speech to the jury remains one of the most quoted passages in American film.

The children in the story called him Atticus, and so, in time, did everyone else. Mary Badham, who played his daughter Scout, stayed close to Peck for the rest of his life, and she always called him Atticus, while he always called her Scout.

He won the Academy Award for Best Actor, on his fifth nomination. Decades later, in 2003, the American Film Institute named Atticus Finch the greatest screen hero of all time, ahead of Indiana Jones and James Bond. The honour was announced just two weeks before Peck’s death, as if the industry had hurried to tell him in time.

What Did Gregory Peck Do After To Kill a Mockingbird?

The same remarkable year, 1962, also brought Cape Fear, in which Peck played a lawyer terrorised by a vengeful ex-convict, and The Guns of Navarone the year before had already shown him leading one of the most popular war adventures ever made, as Captain Keith Mallory on a mission to destroy German guns on a Greek island.

Peck stayed busy and stayed choosy. In The Omen in 1976 he surprised audiences by headlining a horror film, playing an ambassador who comes to believe his adopted son is something far more sinister. The film was a major hit, and it introduced him to a new generation who had never seen Atticus in a cinema.

He also played against type as the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele in The Boys from Brazil in 1978, and Abraham Lincoln in the television miniseries The Blue and the Gray. Then, in 1991, came a lovely piece of casting symmetry. Martin Scorsese remade Cape Fear, and Peck returned — this time playing the defence lawyer for the villain, a small, elegant farewell to one of his most famous films.

His last screen work came in the 1990s, and he retired from acting in 2000. By then the performances had long since secured his place. Fellow liberal leading men of his era, such as Henry Fonda, had built similar reputations for conscience on screen, but nobody else had Atticus. Peck had the one role that turned an actor into a standard other men were measured against.

What Was Gregory Peck’s Net Worth at Death?

Peck was one of Hollywood’s top-paid stars for decades, and he was careful with what he earned. His fortune at death was substantial, and it should be reported as what it is: an estimate, attributed to its source.

Celebrity Net Worth estimates that Gregory Peck had a net worth of about $40 million at the time of his death in 2003. That is the figure most often cited for his estate, and it reflects a long career of major salaries, profit participation on hit films, and valuable property.

A significant part of that wealth was real estate. His longtime home was a large estate in Holmby Hills, Los Angeles, and a year after his death his widow, Veronique, sold the property for $22 million, a sale that gives some sense of the scale of the family’s assets.

Peck also earned well from shrewd deals on films such as The Guns of Navarone and The Omen, where a percentage of a hit could be worth far more than a salary. For a fuller record of his films and honours, his biography on Wikipedia is well worth reading alongside this one.

Who Were Gregory Peck’s Wives?

Peck married twice. His first wife was Greta Kukkonen, a Finnish-born former hairdresser whom he married in October 1942, just as his career was beginning. They had three sons together, but the marriage came under strain as his fame grew, and they divorced in December 1955.

His second marriage began almost immediately, and it lasted the rest of his life. Veronique Passani was a Paris journalist who had interviewed Peck in 1952, before he left for Italy to film Roman Holiday. He asked her to lunch some months later, and according to the family’s telling of it, they were inseparable from then on.

Peck married Veronique on December 31, 1955, the day after his divorce became final. They had two children, and they were together for more than 47 years, until his death. Friends described the marriage as the steady centre of his life, and the glamour of it — the reporter and the movie star — never seemed to fade for either of them.

How Many Children Did Gregory Peck Have?

Gregory Peck had five children. With Greta Kukkonen he had three sons: Jonathan, Stephen, and Carey Paul. With Veronique Passani he had a son, Anthony, and a daughter, Cecilia Peck, who became an actress and documentary filmmaker.

Stephen Peck devoted much of his working life to veterans’ causes, work his father supported proudly. Acting also ran into the next generation. Cecilia appeared in films of her own, and Peck’s grandson Ethan Peck later became an actor in his own right.

The family’s great sorrow came in 1975. Peck’s eldest son, Jonathan, a television news reporter, was found dead at home that June, in what authorities believed was a suicide. Peck rarely spoke of it, but when he did, he said it was the most terrible thing that had happened to him, and that you never get over a thing like that. It deserves to be recorded plainly, and with sympathy, as he himself treated it.

What Honours Did Gregory Peck Receive for His Humanitarian Work?

Peck’s off-screen life was as decorated as his film career. In 1967 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, its honour for outstanding charitable work by a figure in the industry. He also served as president of the Academy itself from 1967 to 1970.

In 1969, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the United States, recognising a lifetime of humanitarian effort. Johnson reportedly told him that, had he run for re-election, he would have liked to make Peck the American ambassador to Ireland, a nod to Peck’s Irish ancestry.

His activism was lifelong and liberal. He supported civil rights, opposed the Vietnam War, campaigned for Democratic candidates, and lent his voice to causes from workers’ rights to a worldwide ban on nuclear weapons. He did this work steadily and without theatrics, in the same measured tone he brought to a courtroom scene.

Later honours included the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1989, and in 1999 the American Film Institute ranked him the twelfth greatest male star of classic Hollywood cinema. The list of his awards runs long, but contemporaries insisted the reputation underneath them was real. Gregory Peck, they said, was simply a decent man.

Lesser-Known Facts About Gregory Peck

• Peck dropped his first name, Eldred, before his career began, and “Gregory” was actually his middle name.
• A back injury suffered in a Martha Graham dance workshop kept him out of military service in World War II, which helped make him available when Hollywood needed leading men.
• He insisted that Audrey Hepburn receive equal billing on Roman Holiday, although she was an unknown and he was the star of the film.
• Peck owned thoroughbred steeplechase horses, and one of them, Different Class, finished third in the 1968 Grand National.
• He kept in touch with Mary Badham, who played Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, for the rest of his life — she called him Atticus, and he called her Scout.
• Brock Peters, who played Tom Robinson, the man Atticus defends in To Kill a Mockingbird, read the eulogy at Peck’s funeral.
• Peck was offered the role of Grandpa Joe in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory late in life, but he died before he could accept it.

Frequently Asked Questions

How old was Gregory Peck when he died?

Gregory Peck died on June 12, 2003, at the age of 87. He had been born on April 5, 1916, in La Jolla, California, and he died in his sleep at home in Los Angeles.

What was Gregory Peck’s real name?

His full name was Eldred Gregory Peck. He dropped “Eldred” early in his career and worked under his middle name, Gregory, for the whole of his professional life.

How many Oscars did Gregory Peck win?

He won one Academy Award, for Best Actor as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird in 1962. He was nominated five times in all, beginning with The Keys of the Kingdom in 1944.

Who were Gregory Peck’s wives?

He married twice: Greta Kukkonen from 1942 to 1955, and Veronique Passani from December 31, 1955, until his death in 2003. His second marriage lasted more than 47 years.

How many children did Gregory Peck have?

He had five children: Jonathan, Stephen and Carey Paul from his first marriage, and Anthony and Cecilia from his second. His daughter Cecilia became an actress and filmmaker.

What was Gregory Peck’s net worth?

Celebrity Net Worth estimates his net worth at death at about $40 million. A significant part of it was property, including his Holmby Hills estate, which his widow sold for $22 million the year after he died.

Final Thoughts

Every generation of actors produces stars. Very few produce a standard. Gregory Peck’s gentleness was never softness, and his strength was never noise, and audiences understood the difference instinctively for sixty years.

Atticus Finch will outlive us all, standing in that courtroom asking a jury to do justice. But it is worth remembering that the decency was not confined to the script. The humanitarian awards, the unglamorous committee work, the causes kept up for decades — those were Peck too.

He died in 2003, two weeks after the American Film Institute called his greatest character the finest hero in the history of film. It is hard to think of a neater ending for a life that, on screen and off, was spent showing people what a good man looks like.