Sunday, June 22, 2003		Lead Article

He kept viewers spellbound
Kuldip Dhiman

SOMETIMES, even great film producers and directors get it wrong. So when a tall, handsome young man with a classic chiselled face appeared for a test in the early forties, David O Selznick, the producer of Gone With the Wind was not impressed. No one knows how the rejected aspirant felt, but poetic justice was done when Alfred Hitchcock cast him as the leading man in the highly successful suspense film Spellbound in 1945.

But there were others who did recognise the potential of Gregory Peck, who after scoring a big hit in a dual role in The Willow and I, caught the attention of filmmakers, and the media as shown by this news report of 1944. "RKO's Days of Glory, another Hollywood tub-thumper for our Soviet allies, has launched the film career of handsome 28-year-old newcomer Gregory Peck. He co-stars with Tamara Toumanova . . . Days of Glory has had a cool reception, but Peck is a hot property."

And he remained a hot property for the next two decades, slowly fading out of public memory after the eighties. By then, the golden age of Hollywood was anyway over. All the major studios had pulled their shutters down, and the rules of filmmaking were being rewritten.

Born in La Jolla, California, and christened Eldred Gregory Peck, his parents separated when he was only five, and he grew up with his maternal grandmother. His mother married a travelling salesman and was often away with her new husband. His father was a local pharmacist who was always doing the night-shift. At the age of 10, Gregory was sent to St John's Military Academy in Los Angeles. After the Academy, he returned to live with his father, and to attend public high school. After graduating, Peck enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley. Prompted by his father's wish of seeing him become a doctor, he set out to become one. But, then, there were better things in store for Gregory than a hospital.