THE ARTS: Last week, when the American Film Institute announced the results of its poll to find the most popular heroes and villains in the history of cinema, the winning hero was Atticus Finch.
Finch was the idealistic southern lawyer who defied the public view when he chose to defend a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in the 1962 film of Harper Lee's novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.
While that poll result owes much to the dramatic resonance of Lee's fictional creation, it stands primarily as a tribute to the actor who brought the character of Atticus Finch so vividly to life on the screen - Gregory Peck, who died overnight on Wednesday at the age of 87.
The role of Finch epitomised the qualities that marked Peck's distinguished career as an actor, which spanned six decades. In his most memorable roles, Peck was the personification of decency, dignity and moral conviction, and in a striking example of art imitating life, those roles mirrored his public persona as a generous, thoughtful and principled man.
Peck's off-screen advocacy of liberal causes was so evidently sincere that he commanded respect and admiration in the most conservative quarters, although there were some exceptions, principally the Nixon administration which firmly resented his vocal, conscientious objection to the Vietnam war.
Ironically, it was a war-time opportunity that gave Peck his entrée to Hollywood. A pre-med student born in California on April 5th, 1916, he moved to New York in the early 1940s to pursue his alternative interest in acting.
After just a couple of Broadway stage appearances, he was invited to Hollywood at a time when many of the young leading men were away at war. Peck was barred from enlisting due to a spinal injury sustained at college.
In 1944, he made his screen debut in the forgettable Days of Glory, but followed it in the same year with The Keys of the Kingdom, playing a Scottish missionary from the ages of 18 to 80 when Peck himself was just 28.
It earned him an Oscar nomination, the first of four in his first five years as a movie actor.
He was nominated again for the family saga, The Yearling (1946), Gentleman's Agreement (in 1947, when he authoritatively played a reporter posing as Jewish to expose anti-Semitism), and Twelve O'Clock High (1948), before winning the best actor Oscar, on his fifth and final nomination, for To Kill a Mockingbird in 1962.
Peck studied and advocated the Stanislavski method of acting, but unlike the great majority of his fellow students, he delivered performances that were transparent and unshowy, proving time and again that less is more.
Certainly, there have been many greater film actors, but Peck comfortably found his style and played to his own strengths.
In 1992, along with producer Noel Pearson, academic Richard Kearney and former UCD president Patrick Masterson, Peck was one of the driving forces behind the initiative to set up the Centre for Film Studies at UCD.