Word: mockingbird
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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...
...long prime with a Mount Rushmore visage and the voice of Yahweh on a good day, Peck was the sonorous pitchman for movie humanism. He showed how a strong man could also be a 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...
...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 motivation...
...male middle-schoolers in 1992, The Firm, along with maybe Jurassic Park or the latest Stephen King novel, was the entry point to the world of adult bestsellers, critically ignored books that were still so much cooler than To Kill a Mockingbird. The best way to understand The Firm is to compare it to the film version. I remember being disappointed with the movie. It may have been the first page-to-screen adaptation I’ve ever eagerly anticipated, and I concluded—perhaps inevitably—that it wasn’t as good...
...MUSIC Berlin didn't always anticipate the musical fashion of the time. Often he imitated it. As a glance at "The Complete Lyrics of Irving Berlin" reveals, he wrote a zillion rag tunes ("That Mysterious Rag," "Ragtime Violin!", "Ragtime Mockingbird," "Ragtime Jockey Man," "Ragtime Soldier Man," "That International Rag") before and after "Alexander." He based whole songs on other people's airs ("That Mesmerizing Mendelsohn Tune," from Mendelsohn's "Spring Song"). He'd drop a snatch of a public-domain song in one of his (the bugle call and "Swanee River" in "Alexander's Ragtime Band"; "There's No Place...