Word: atticus
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...movie studio wanted Rock Hudson to play Atticus Finch. Fate decreed otherwise. Gregory Peck got the role of the small-town Southern lawyer in the 1962 film version of To Kill a Mockingbird. The hero of Harper Lee's Pulitzer-prizewinning 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." The star replied, "Harper, that's great acting...
Actually, it was great inhabiting. "You never really understand a person ...," Atticus says, "until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it." Tolerance ripening into empathy: that was Peck's gift in playing an elevated species of American, the man of strength and compassion. Today that species is more than endangered; it has nearly vanished. But it flourished for most of the actor's half-century onscreen, when Americans prided themselves on their fellow feeling for the downtrodden and their ability to uplift the races. Peck was liberal when liberal was cool...
...gentle man. He counseled ethnic tolerance: of Jews, in Gentleman's Agreement, and blacks, in Mockingbird. As a crusading attorney who is also a gentle single dad to his two young kids, Peck made rectitude appear robust. That sanctity had staying power: this month the American Film Institute chose Atticus Finch as the top hero in U.S. movie history...
Winners and losers are all too clearly defined in today's movies. Peck's best films always found thoughtful shades of gray. Atticus has taken on the case of a black man accused of raping a white woman--a perilous assignment in an Alabama town in the 1930s. He argues his case brilliantly, demolishes the opposition, convinces each member of the movie audience...and loses. But Atticus has shown courage in the fight. As he leaves the courtroom in defeat, a black preacher attending the trial whispers a command to Atticus' 6-year-old daughter. "Miss Jean Louise, stand...
DIED. Gregory Peck, 87, classically handsome, gravelly voiced Hollywood leading man famed for playing characters who were idealistic, courageous and wise; in Los Angeles. Over a six-decade career, Peck received five Oscar nominations and won the best actor award in 1962 for his portrayal of Atticus Finch, a small-town lawyer battling racism in To Kill a Mockingbird. Although not all his roles were likable?Peck played a mad scientist who clones Hitler in The Boys from Brazil?he once said, "I don't think I could stay interested for a couple of months in a character of mean...