‘There’s a place in my heart for Gregory Peck’

Aditha Dissanayake

As a teenager I grew up wanting to be like Atticus Finch the lawyer in Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, To Kill a Mocking Bird. In my early 20s when I saw the movie with Gregory Peck in the role of Atticus the inevitable happened. I fell in love. And, for once in my life my mother had no objections. For once she could not find fault with the subject of my “heart’s desire”.

Small consolation. We are only two among an uncountable number of others, scattered all over the world who were also equally in love with his lanky, 6-foot-3 frame, his dark, formidable eyebrows, his aura of strength and compassion, confidence and diffidence, who sent him 5,000 letters a week. And one, among them was sent by my friend Arasi more than seventy years ago. She recalls falling in love with him at the age of 13.

“So I sent him a Postcard.’Mr. Gregory Peck, Hollywood, off Los Angeles, California, USA’.’ Dear Mr Peck, I said, this is just to tell you how much I like your film performances. I never miss a single one.’ This was at the height of the war, she recalls. “And six months later I got an autographed photograph!”

Not all his fans are women. Men love Greg too. As one critic noted way back in 1948 “Men also immediately like him and wish him well; they feel that he is, in fact, an average human being—luckier, better looking and more gifted than they, but essentially one of themselves.”

Born as Eldred Gregory Peck in La Jolla, California in his own words he was “rather dim” at high-school. Never having liked the name Eldred, when he landed in New York and started his career in the theater he called himself by his middle name, Gregory, a name which would soon become a legend.

In the aftermath of the Second World War he was in Sri Lanka to film The Purple Plain. The story adapted for the screen by Eric Ambler based on H E Bates’ novel, is set in the jungles of Burma but was filmed here with Greg in the role of Squadron Leader Forrester who falls in love with Anna, a slim, pretty teacher, played by Burmese actress Win Min Than. The film, judged the Best British Film in 1954, was produced on location in Sigiriya, and on several other locations later seen in The Bridge on the River Kwai. Arasi recalls seeing “GP” as she calls him, in Kandy. In Kadugannawa at midnight.

“I must have been about 18 then. A whole group of us hired a van and drove to Kadugannawa from Kandy, at midnight, to watch the filming.” Alas, such is life, she admits she was a bit disappointed when she finally saw him. “He was too red (probably because of the heat).”

Though he played memorable performances in The Guns of Navarone, Roman Holiday, The Omen, etc. for most of us he will always be the small-town Southern lawyer in the 1962 film version of To Kill a Mockingbird. It appears that the hero of Harper Lee’s novel had been a man much like her father, and when the author met the actor on the first day of shooting, she noted, “Gregory, you’ve got a little potbelly just like my daddy.” And Greg replied, “Harper, that’s great acting.”

How “great” the acting is, became evident when Atticus, was voted the greatest screen hero of all time by the American Film Institute in May 2003, only two weeks before Greg’s death (beating out Indiana Jones, who was placed second, and James Bond who came third).

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