By Bob Thomas
The Associated Press

Gregory Peck

LOS ANGELES - Gregory Peck, the lanky, handsome movie star whose long career included such classics as Roman Holiday, Spellbound and his Academy Award winner, To Kill a Mockingbird, has died. He was 87.

Peck died overnight, spokesman Monroe Friedman said.

Peck's craggy good looks, grace and measured speech contributed to his screen image as the decent, courageous man of action. From his film debut in 1944 with Days of Glory, he was never less than a star. He was nominated for an Oscar five times, and his range of roles was astonishing.

Commanding presence

He portrayed a priest in Keys of the Kingdom, combat heroes in Twelve O'Clock High and Pork Chop Hill, Westerners in Yellow Sky and The Gunfighter, a romantic in Roman Holiday. His commanding presence suited him for legendary characters: King David in David and Bathsheba, sea captains in Captain Horatio Hornblower and Moby Dick, F. Scott Fitzgerald in Beloved Infidel, the war leader MacArthur, and Abraham Lincoln in the TV miniseries The Blue and the Grey.

Peck's rare attempts at unsympathetic roles usually failed. He played the renegade son in the Western Duel in the Sun and the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele in The Boys from Brazil.

Off-screen as well as on, Peck conveyed a quiet dignity. He had one amicable divorce, and scandal never touched him. He served as president of the Motion Picture Academy and was active in the Motion Picture and Television Fund, American Cancer Society, National Endowment for the Arts and other causes.

"I'm not a do-gooder," he insisted after learning of the Academy's Jean Hersholt humanitarian award in 1968. "It embarrassed me to be classified as a humanitarian. I simply take part in activities that I believe in."

'Died of old age'

Peck died at his Los Angeles home overnight, with his wife, Veronique, at his side, Friedman said.

"He had just been getting older and more fragile. He wasn't really ill. He just sort of ran his course and died of old age."

During his first five years in films, Peck scored four Academy Award nominations as best actor: Keys of the Kingdom (1944), The Yearling (1946), Gentleman's Agreement (1947), Twelve O'Clock High (1949).

Gentleman's Agreement, in which he played a magazine writer who poses as a Jew to expose anti-Semitism, was considered a daring film in its time. Peck commented in 1971 that his agent cautioned him: "A lot of people will resent the picture. Anti-Semitism runs very deep in this country."

Peck ignored his advice. Gentleman's Agreement made money and won the Oscar as best picture.

In To Kill a Mockingbird - for which he won the 1962 Oscar as best actor - he played Atticus Finch, a small-town Southern lawyer who defies public sentiment to defend a black rape suspect.

"I put everything I had into it - all my feelings and everything I'd learned in 46 years of living, about family life and fathers and children," he remarked in 1989.

This year, an American Film Institute listing of the top heroes in film ranked Peck's Finch as No. 1.