Page 203 - Cousins - Celebrities, Saints & Sinners

Gregory Peck

9th Cousin

1 time removed

Common Ancestor

Father: Richard Baldwin
Chesham, Buckinghamshire, England
1570 - 1632
Born: Died:
Mother: Isabel Harding 5 April 1916 12 June 2003
Buckinghamshire, England La Jolla, California Los Angeles, California
1577 - 1630
Eldred Gregory Peck’s parents were Bernice Mae and
Gregory Pear Peck. They separated when he was three
and divorced several years later. As their marriage
broke apart, young Gregory was primarily raised by his
maternal grandmother. At the age of 10, Peck attended
St. John’s Catholic Military Academy in Los Angeles
before returning to live with his father while attending
San Diego High School.
After graduating, Peck enrolled in the pre-med program
at the University of California, Berkeley. It was there
that he became interested in acting and appeared in
several school plays. By the time he graduated in 1939,
he had abandoned his plans to become a doctor and
headed to New York City to pursue his passion for
acting, winning a scholarship to the Neighborhood
Playhouse, where he studied with notable
instructor Sanford Meisner.

While earning his living working various odd jobs
around New York City, in 1942 Peck made his
Broadway debut in The Morning Star. Though the production was not well received by
audiences, Peck earned critical acclaim for his acting and his career began to blossom. Peck also
married for the first time, to Greta Kekkonen, with whom he would have three children before
their divorce in 1954.

In 1944, Peck landed a role in his first Hollywood film, Days of Glory, playing a Russian guerrilla
fighter. His fame grew following the film's release and continued to flourish later that year,
with The Keys of the Kingdom, in which he played a missionary priest and earned his first in a
flurry of Academy Award nominations. For his performance as a veteran of the Civil War in The
Yearling (1946), Peck received his second Oscar nod, followed by a 1948 best-actor nomination

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