
Gregory Peck’s moral convictions defined the type of roles he wanted to play on screen. What irony that Gregory Peck’s greatest onscreen success was as a character who experienced failure. Alabama lawyer Atticus Finch, defending an innocent black man in “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962), loses his case. Still, Peck’s defeat becomes a victory, not only because he profits from a winning novel and screenplay, but also because he’s the one playing Finch. When audiences stumbled out of darkened cinema halls in 1962, Finch to them was no longer just...