Classic Hollywood: Who were Gregory Peck’s favorite actors and other secrets of the trade

April 5 marks the centennial of actor Gregory Peck’s birth. Known for portraying men of conviction on screen, Peck was one off-screen as well, serving as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and outspokenly supporting liberal causes.

Below are some of our favorite quotes from Peck on the craft of acting from the pages of The Times.

Acting is satisfying “when I have a part where I can communicate with people, touching their emotions and giving them something to walk away from the theater with, something to remember in the way of human experience. The parts that came off best for me were those where the action became secondary or even unimportant, but where I could identify with the character I was portraying.” (1974)

“I’m not nearly as confident as those hero characters are. Although I think in films like ‘Twelve O’Clock High’ and ‘The Guns of Navarone,’ it seemed to me that I brought in a little ambivalence of character and vulnerability and self-doubt whenever there was an opening for it. But am I like these heroes in real life? No. Sometimes I’ve been courageous and sometimes less so.” (1994)

“You do your best acting in your worst pictures because this is where you must provide the coherence that is lacking in the script.” (1967)

The late Max Reinhardt said, “ ‘On the stage you are playing a game of make-believe, so it doesn’t matter if you act foolish or if you laugh awkwardly or cry badly. You’ll get it right eventually. The only thing that matters is playing the game. You do it by putting one Gregory in the corner, offstage, where he can watch, while the other Gregory goes onstage and plays the game of make-believe.’ That turned the key for me. It rid me of the demon of self-consciousness. It made my career, because a professional actor cannot be self-conscious.” (1974)

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“When I act, one half of me sits back and watches the other half go up and do his tricks before the camera. When I’m able to shake free of my own ego, pushing it off into a corner, then I know I’m acting well. There’s a special innocence, a lack of guile, a new reality when an actor achieves that kind of detachment.” (1974)

“I believe [versatility] is [overrated], even though it might seem a justification of my own limitations to say so. In my view, the public enjoys most an actor who makes the acting disappear. He probably plays the same part over and over, but does it so effectively that the public identifies with him and believes in him. It was true of Bogart, Cooper and others.

“I don’t believe that audiences are particularly moved by fellows who merely transform themselves with makeup and heavy accents. That’s strictly mimicry and it belongs in amateur theatricals. The art of acting is to communicate an experience to the audience. That experience is filtered through the personality of the actor, whether it’s Steve McQueen or Robert Redford. The outer transformation is incidental.” (1974)

“I’m not much good at violence. I don’t see myself playing Shakespeare. Given my choice, I enjoy comedy the most. I haven’t done nearly as much comedy as I’d like, perhaps 5 out of 50 pictures. I’ve always felt that producers were short-sighted about my comic ability … After I did “Roman Holiday” with Audrey Hepburn and “Designing Women” with Lauren Bacall I thought I’d be besieged with offers to do comedy, but I wasn’t. Perhaps I’m not as good at comedy as I seem to think, but I haven’t given up the notion yet. Hopefully in my mature years I’ll have a chance to bring laughter to audiences. To make people laugh is a great gift.” (1974)

“I’ve always felt that star quality was not any mysterious X factor but rather the ability to make second-rate material seem first-rate. This is what Bogart did so well.” (1967)

“Laurence Olivier. He did it all. He played all the great Shakespearean roles. He was the director of the National Theatre in Great Britain. He made a lot of movies … He dared to do so much, to accept all challenges.

“I remember one scene [in ‘The Boys From Brazil’] where I was raving as Dr. Mengele about how I had cloned Hitler … and after I finished this tirade, Larry [Olivier] said, ‘Very well thought out.’ That was a nice compliment. (1999)

“[Olivier] was just about ‘it’ in my opinion … I suppose he and Spencer Tracy were my favorite actors. [Tracy] had total concentration. I saw ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’ recently. He’d had a heart attack and knew he wasn’t long for this world, and he put everything he had into that role. Without self-pity. And without showing any effort.” (2000)

“I think it is a combination of personality and acting ability. If you ask me my favorite actress of all time, I will tell you that it is Greta Garbo. She shared her emotions with the camera and the audience. They were very truthful emotions. To my mind, she was an early practitioner of the Method. She felt everything she did and had the intelligence to go with it. … And that is the key for the audience. If they believe it, then they’ve spent a couple of good hours at the cinema.” (2000)

“Every actor and producer knows the taste of [failure]. When it happens, it’s a very personal kind of rejection. It brings on depression and frustration.” (1974)

“I came out here from the theater [in New York] having studied with Sandy Meisner. ‘Acting is doing’ was his watchword: You must be doing something to achieve an objective, and this gives an air of detachment to the actor. I came out here with the idea of being a good actor. I never seemed to catch on to sticking in one groove. I remember, for example, I made half a dozen westerns and my agent said, ‘You can become a big, big star in westerns.’ But I wanted to do a lot of different things. Western actors don’t talk much. I wanted to do some talking. So I set out to do a whole variety of things.” (1999)

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kevin.crust@latimes.com

@storyspheare