He then took further classes at San Diego State University, paying his way by driving a truck so that he could qualify to study at the University of California in Berkeley, majoring in English. In college, Peck joined the rowing team and also began to take an interest in acting. This developed into such a passion that he ended up skipping his graduation ceremony and taking a bus to New York City, where he studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse.

Peck was so poor that he could hardly afford to eat and often slept outside in Central Park. Somehow, he scraped by and managed to get odd jobs such as working at the 1939 World Fair. Having never liked his first name, he started introducing himself as Gregory. In 1942, Peck made his Broadway début, and the stage was set for a brilliant career.

Peck's career benefited from the fact that he was one of few young men available during the war years, being unfit for military service due to a back injury suffered in one of Martha Graham's dance classes. He was soon lured away from Broadway and back to California, where he took his first movie role in Days of Glory, alongside Tamara Toumanova and Alan Reed. The film enjoyed commercial success, though Peck's acting was initially unpopular with the critics. Peck’s second film, The Keys to the Kingdom, in which he played a Catholic missionary in China, with Vincent Price and Roddy McDowall, changed all that, winning him his first Oscar nomination. Over the next two decades Peck was nominated four more times, for The Yearling, with Jane Wyman and Claude Jarman Jr.; Gentleman's Agreement, with Dorothy McGuire and John Garfield; Twelve O'Clock High, with Hugh Marlowe and Robert Arthur; and To Kill a Mockingbird, with Mary Badham, Philip Alford, and Robert Duvall, the film for which he finally won.

Peck also received a Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 1968 Oscar ceremony, in recognition of his persistent defense of his liberal principles including his stance against the Vietnam war and against the McCarthy investigations.

Besides those which drew him to the attention of the Academy, Peck's famous films include Roman Holiday, which was also Audrey Hepburn's début; Ernest Hemingway adaptation The Snows of Kilimanjaro, with Ava Gardner; John Huston's Moby Dick, The Guns of Navarone, with David Niven and Anthony Quinn; and the Omen series, with Lee Remick, Billie Whitelaw, and Patrick Troughton. In the 80s, Peck also did television work, playing Abraham Lincoln in The Blue and the Gray. He retired in 1991 as the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute, later receiving a Crystal Globe award for outstanding contributions to world cinema.

Peck has been married twice. His first wife was Greta Kukkonen, by whom he had three sons: Jonathan, who tragically committed suicide in 1975; Stephen; and the actor Carey Paul Peck. After the couple divorced, Peck married Veronique Passani and had two more children: actor, writer, and producer Tony Peck; and actress and producer Cecilia Peck.

Peck died in his sleep in 2003 and is buried in the mausoleum on the Church of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles.

YUDDY