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“Stand up, your father is passing”

Gregory Peck will always be identified with one role above all others during a six-decade career.

So indelible is Peck's performance as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird that just a week before his death on June 12, at 87 of natural causes, Finch was chosen by an American Film Institute poll as the screen's No. 1 all-time hero.

Peck took the best-actor Academy Award for playing the principled Southern father/lawyer who defended a railroaded black man in the classic 1962 screen adaptation of Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. He beat Lawrence of Arabia's Peter O'Toole and Birdman of Alcatraz's Burt Lancaster, both in career-making performances. It was his only Oscar win, though he had five nominations.

And yet, audiences are just as likely to associate Peck with an array of memorable performances as polished but tightly wound professionals or military officers, whose tempers, when they occasionally blew up, spurred some unforgettable screen moments.

His chewing out of slacker Air Force subordinate Hugh Marlowe in 1949's Twelve O'Clock High and David Niven in 1961's The Guns of Navarone rate with the most entertaining human combustions in movie history.

Though these appealed predominantly to male audiences, women were crazy for the handsome and usually sensitive actor. He played a priest in the movie that got him his first Oscar nomination while also making him a star, 1945's The Keys of the Kingdom.

In 1946, he was a sexy villain and loving dad in two of the year's biggest hits, Duel in the Sun and The Yearling, shortly after he had cemented his overnight-star rep by easily holding his own with the era's most popular actress, Ingrid Bergman, in Alfred Hitchcock's popular Spellbound.

Peck's ability to brood helped make The Macomber Affair and The Snows of Kilimanjaro, in the opinion of many, the movies' two best Hemingway adaptations. When it was time to make a 1956 movie out of Sloan Wilson's novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Peck was an automatic choice and just the suburbanite you wanted to see with a briefcase waiting for that commuter train into New York City.

Even in 1962's Cape Fear, when co-star Robert Mitchum obviously had the juicier role, Peck's stalwart doggedness set up Mitchum to be as nastily menacing as possible as the rapist terrorizing a small-town lawyer's family.

Peck's occasional rigidity contributed to his bombing out as F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1959's Beloved Infidel and Captain Ahab in John Huston's 1956 Moby Dick. But at other times, the rigidity worked for him, as when Peck played novelist C.S. Forester's British naval hero in 1951's Captain Horatio Hornblower.

Stoic cool is one thing, but Peck also was a thing of geometrical beauty wearing one of those prototypical Brit-seafaring hats with the widest wingspan this side of Howard Hughes's famed airplane, the Spruce Goose.

He also proved himself an unexpectedly marvellous farceur in 1957's Designing Woman and had a juicy time playing Nazi Josef Mengele in 1978's The Boys From Brazil. After his debut in 1943's indifferent Nazis-vs.-Russians Days of Glory -- albeit in the lead role -- his career took off immediately.

It was more than long enough for him to win the AFI's 1989 Life Achievement Award. ''He was such a gentleman,'' says Tony Curtis, who starred with Peck in 1963's Captain Newman M.D. ''He was always so gentle with everyone.''

The California-born onetime Berkeley pre-med student managed to avoid scandal. Married twice, his first divorce was amicable. His wife of 48 years, onetime journalist Veronique Passani, was at his side when he died. But he did not avoid tragedy: His oldest son, Jon, committed suicide in 1975. Active in social causes and a 1967 winner of the Motion Picture Academy's humanitarian award, he was, said Cape Fear co-star Polly Bergen, ''more than a great man. He was a complete and total gentleman, one of the dearest I've ever worked with. He taught me chess between scenes.''

Peck conducted his life with dignity, and we got used to seeing his characters -- far more often than not - do the same on screen. Speaking of his Mockingbird role in 1989, he said, ''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. And my feelings about racial justice and inequality and opportunity.''

That is why the elderly black gentleman's line to Atticus' daughter, Scout, has the power that it does after her father's failed gesture in court: ''Stand up,'' he says, ''your father's passing.''

Courtesy USA Today