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Gregory Peck (1916-2003) plays opposite Ava Gardner (1922-1990) in “The Great Sinner,” a story of love and gambling addiction by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Belgian collector card by Kwatta, Bois d'Haine, no. C. 270. Photo: MGM. Melvyn Douglas in The Great Sinner (Robert Siodmak, 1949).

Two-time Oscar-winner Melvyn Douglas (1901-1981) was one of America's finest actors and would enjoy cinema immortality if for no other reason than his being the man who made Greta Garbo laugh in Ernst Lubitsch's classic comedy Ninotchka (1939), but he was much, much more.

Melvyn Douglas was born as Melvyn Edouard Hesselberg in Macon, USA, in 1901. He was the son of Lena Priscilla (née Shackelford) and Edouard Gregory Hesselberg, a well-known concert pianist and composer, and he was determined at an early age to take to the stage. Douglas never finished high school, as he focused entirely on his career as an actor. He developed his acting skills in Shakespearean repertory while in his teens and served in the United States Army in World War I. After the war, he appeared with stock companies in Sioux City, Iowa, Evansville, Indiana, Madison, Wisconsin and Detroit, Michigan. Finally, he made his Broadway debut in 1928 as a gangster in the drama 'A Free Soul.' His greatest success on stage came with the comedy 'Tonight or Never'. Not only did the play run for 232 performances, but Douglas met the woman who would be his wife of nearly 50 years: his co-star, Helen Gahagan. They were married in 1931. His film debut followed in the film version, Tonight or Never (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931) alongside Gloria Swanson. His reputation as a sensitive performer of even complex roles earned him one of the leading roles alongside Greta Garbo in the adaptation of Luigi Pirandello's As You Desire Me (George Fitzmaurice, 1932). The film was a success. Douglas shared top billing with Boris Karloff and Charles Laughton in the sardonic horror classic The Old Dark House (James Whale, 1932). Subsequent roles were more marginal and Douglas returned to Broadway in 1934. However, a lucrative non-exclusive contract with Columbia brought him back to Hollywood, where he rose to become one of the most popular comic actors of the decade with his performance alongside Claudette Colbert in She Married Her Boss (Gregory La Cava, 1935). He went on to star alongside some of the biggest female stars. Alongside Marlene Dietrich, he was seen in Angel (1937) directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Douglas starred alongside Irene Dunne in the Screwball comedy Theodora Gets Wild (Richard Boleslawski, 1936) and partnered with Joan Crawford several times, including in A Woman's Face (George Cukor, 1941). One of his most sympathetic roles was as the belatedly attentive father of Freddie Bartholomew in Captains Courageous (Victor Fleming, 1937). His best-known role to this day was in Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939), where he makes Greta Garbo laugh. He also co-starred in Garbo's final film, Two-Faced Woman (George Cukor, 1941).

After 1942 Melvyn Douglas went to war again. His films after 1946, however, were rarely of the quality of his previous work. In the late 1940s, he - along with fellow liberals Edward G. Robinson and Henry Fonda - were gray-listed - not explicitly blacklisted, they just weren't offered any work. Douglas returned to Broadway once again. Here he visibly proved himself as a character actor and won a Tony Award for his performance in 'The Best Man'. It wasn't until the early 1960s that Douglas was back on the big screen. For his role as Paul Newman's father in the Western Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963), he won an Academy Award for Best Male Supporting Actor. He received two more Oscar nominations and won one for the comedy-drama Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979) starring Peter Sellers. Douglas won a Tony Award for his Broadway lead role in 'The Best Man' (1960) by Gore Vidal, and an Emmy for his role in Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (1967). He continued to work as an actor until his death. Douglas appeared as Senator Joseph Carmichael in The Changeling (1980) and opposite Fred Astaire in Ghost Story (John Irvin, 1981) in his final completed film role. For his work, he was immortalised with two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Douglas married Rosalind Hightower at a young age, with whom he had two children. In 1931, he remarried actress and politician Helen Gahagan, with whom he also had two children. Helen entered politics in the 1940s and won a seat in the US Congress. In 1950 she lost the election for Senator from California against Richard Nixon. The couple remained married until her death in 1980. Melvyn Douglas died a year later, in New York. He was 80.

Sources: Wikipedia (Dutch and English), and IMDb.

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Belgian collectors card by Kwatta, Bois-d'Haine, no. C. 245. Photo: MGM. Gregory Peck in The Great Sinner (Robert Siodmak, 1949).

American actor Gregory Peck (1916-2003) was one of the most popular film stars from the 1940s to the 1960s. Peck received five nominations for Academy Award for Best Actor and won once – for his performance as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). He almost always played courageous, nobly heroic good guys who saw injustice and fought it. Among his best known films are Spellbound (1945), The Yearling (1946), Gentleman's Agreement (1947), Roman Holiday (1953), The Guns of Navarone (1961), and Cape Fear (1962).

Eldred Gregory Peck was born in 1916 in La Jolla, California (now in San Diego). His parents were Bernice Mary (Ayres) and Gregory Pearl Peck, a chemist, and druggist in San Diego. His parents divorced when he was five years old. An only child, he was sent to live with his grandmother. He never felt he had a stable childhood. His fondest memories are of his grandmother taking him to the cinema every week and of his dog, which followed him everywhere. Peck's father encouraged him to take up medicine. He studied pre-med at UC-Berkeley and, while there, got bitten by the acting bug and decided to change the focus of his studies. He enrolled in the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and debuted on Broadway after graduation. His debut was in Emlyn Williams' play 'The Morning Star' (1942). By 1943, he was in Hollywood, where he debuted in the RKO film Days of Glory (Jacques Tourneur, 1944). Stardom came with his next film, The Keys of the Kingdom (John M. Stahl, 1944), for which he was nominated for an Oscar. Tony Fontana at IMDb: "Peck's screen presence displayed the qualities for which he became well known. He was tall, rugged and heroic, with a basic decency that transcended his roles." He appeared opposite Ingrid Bergman in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) as an amnesia victim accused of murder. In The Yearling (Clarence Brown, 1946), he was again nominated for an Oscar and won the Golden Globe. He was especially effective in Westerns and appeared in such varied fare as David O. Selznick's critically blasted Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946), the somewhat better received Yellow Sky (William A. Wellman, 1948), and the acclaimed The Gunfighter (Henry King, 1950). He was nominated again for the Academy Award for his roles in Gentleman's Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947), which dealt with anti-Semitism, and Twelve O'Clock High (Henry King, 1949), a story of high-level stress in an Air Force bomber unit in World War II. In 1947, Peck, along with Dorothy McGuire, David O'Selznick, and Mel Ferrer, founded the La Jolla Playhouse, located in his hometown, and produced many of the classics there. Due to film commitments, he could not return to Broadway but whet his appetite for live theatre on occasion at the Playhouse, keeping it firmly established with a strong, reputable name over the years.

With a string of hits to his credit, Gregory Peck made the decision to only work in films that interested him. He continued to appear as the heroic, larger-than-life figures in such films as Captain Horatio Hornblower (Raoul Walsh, 1951) with Virginia Mayo, and Moby Dick (John Huston, 1956) with Richard Basehart. He worked with Audrey Hepburn in her debut film, Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953). While filming The Bravados (Henry King, 1958), he decided to become a cowboy in real life, so he purchased a vast working ranch near Santa Barbara, California - already stocked with 600 head of prize cattle. In the early 1960s, he gave a powerful performance as Captain Keith Mallory in The Guns of Navarone (J. Lee Thompson, 1961) opposite David Niven and Anthony Quinn. The film was one of the biggest box-office hits of that year. Peck finally won the Oscar, after four nominations, for his performance as lawyer Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962). He also appeared in two darker films than he usually made, Cape Fear (J. Lee Thompson, 1962) opposite Robert Mitchum, and Captain Newman, M.D. (David Miller, 1963) with Tony Curtis, which dealt with the way people live. The financial failure of Cape Fear (1962) ended his company, Melville Productions. After making Arabesque (Stanley Donen, 1966) with Sophia Loren, Peck withdrew from acting for three years in order to concentrate on various humanitarian causes, including the American Cancer Society. In the early 1970s, he produced two films, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Gordon Davidson, 1972) and The Dove (Charles Jarrott, 1974), when his film career stalled. He made a comeback playing, somewhat woodenly, Ambassador Robert Thorn in the horror film The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976) with Lee Remick. After that, he returned to the bigger-than-life roles he was best known for, such as MacArthur (Joseph Sargent, 1977) and the infamous Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele in the huge hit The Boys from Brazil (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1978) with Laurence Olivier and James Mason. In the 1980s, he moved into television with the miniseries The Blue and the Gray (Andrew V. McLaglen, 1982) in which he played Abraham Lincoln, and The Scarlet and the Black (Jerry London, 1983) with Christopher Plummer and John Gielgud. In 1991, he appeared in the remake of his 1962 film, playing a different role, in Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear (1991). He was also cast as the progressive-thinking owner of a wire and cable business in Other People's Money (Norman Jewison, 1991), starring Danny DeVito. In 1967, Peck received the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. He was also been awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom. Always politically progressive, he was active in such causes as anti-war protests, workers' rights, and civil rights. In 2003, Peck's portrayal of Atticus Finch was named the greatest film hero of the past 100 years by the American Film Institute, only two weeks before his death. Atticus beat out Indiana Jones, who was placed second, and James Bond who came third. Gregory Peck died in 2003 in Los Angeles, California. He was 87. Peck was married twice. From 1942 till 1955, he was married to Greta Kukkonen. They had three children: Jonathan Peck (1944-1975), Stephen Peck (1946), and Carey Paul Peck (1949). His second wife was Veronique Passani, whom he met at the set of Roman Holliday. They married in 1955 and had two children: Tony Peck (1956) and Cecilia Peck (1958). The couple remained together till his death.

Sources: Tony Fontana (IMDb), and IMDb.

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

This bodice was first used by Ingrid Bergman in the film "Gaslight". It was reworked by Irene Lentz by covering the base garment with a original 19th century paisley shawl and the addition of fur trim for use in "The Great Sinner"