• May 03, 1993
• Vol. 39
• No. 17

Gregory Peck

• 

From PEOPLE Magazine

I have been described as tall, dark and handsome a million times," says Gregory Peck. "If it's true, I'm just lucky." Blessed is more like it. At 77, Peck retains the chiseled eyebrows and granite cheekbones of a monument. And a mane of white hair adds a dignity to his spare, 6'3" frame. A romantic idol since Spellbound in 1945, he still rumbles with the seductive voice that has charmed women from Audrey Hepburn in 1953's Roman Holiday to Sophia Loren in 1966's Arabesque to Jane Fonda in 1989's Old Gringo. "There are not enough adjectives to describe him," says his old friend Lauren Bacall (with whom he starred recently in the TNT movie The Portrait). "He is a man of grace, wit and integrity...whose face I never tire of gazing upon."

Peck is as unfazed by such accolades as he is by his lifetime achievement stature. "You can make a business of picking up little statues, but I don't do that," he says. (He did, however, present a special posthumous Oscar for Hepburn.) In 1991 he became a grandfather, thanks to son Tony and daughter-in-law Cheryl Tiegs, and still acts occasionally. "When something comes along that interests me," he says, surveying the four lush acres in L.A.'s Holmby Hills that he shares with Veronique, his wife of 37 years, "I'm just as excited as I was 40 years ago."