Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 13, 1993 TAG: 9302130307
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JERRY BUCK ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
MOVIE LEGENDS REUNITED IN TNT'S `PORTRAIT'
It was a reunion of sorts, Gregory Peck says, working with Lauren Bacall in the TNT movie "The Portrait.""We haven't worked together since `Designing Woman' in 1957," he said. "We've kept up our friendship over the years. I've known Betty longer than almost anybody. In 1942, she was an usherette at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway when I was doing `The Willow and I.' Everyone was talking about that sensational girl - tall and willowy and with a catlike face."
In "The Portrait," which premieres Saturday (at 8 p.m., with encores at 10 p.m. and midnight), Peck and Bacall play a couple so devoted that they exclude their daughter - played by Peck's real-life daughter, Cecilia.
"There was no stress and strain," Peck said of working with Bacall. "It helps that we like each other - not that you want to be so comfortable that you put the audience to sleep. But it helped that we appeared to be a genuine family on the screen."
"The Portrait," adapted by Lynn Roth from Tina Howe's play "Painting Churches," is virtually a three-character drama, featuring Peck as Gardner Church, a poet laureate and retiring college professor, Bacall as his wife, Fanny, and Peck's daughter as their daughter, Mags, an artist who wants to paint her parents' picture.
Peck, who was executive producer, said he suggested the casting of Bacall and his daughter and sought Arthur Penn to direct. The movie was filmed at Raleigh, N.C., and at three North Carolina college campuses: Duke, Wake Forest and North Carolina State.
"I'd seen the play, and I didn't think it could be made as a film," Peck said. "Everything takes place in the living room. But what Ted Turner's people did was take everything they talked about and move it outdoors. They talk about me while rowing, but we went out and did it. We went to the train station and to the campus for alumni day."
Along with Church's retirement from teaching, the couple is packing up to move to their summer house. An added complication is that Church is in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, which his wife tries to pass off as "the absent-minded professor."
"The Churches live in their insular academic world where they are stars," said Peck. "They're devoted to each other, and the daughter has always felt excluded. They agree to sit for her, but they rarely cooperate and continue to shut her out."
The story moves toward a point of breaking through the barriers and forming a new family relationship.
This is a rare television appearance by Peck. He previously starred in the movie "The Scarlet and the Black" and played Abraham Lincoln in the miniseries "The Blue and the Gray."
Currently his production company is developing a contemporary and Americanized version of "Wild Strawberries," the 1957 Swedish film directed by Ingmar Bergman. It tells of an elderly professor who reviews his life while en route to receive an honor.
"I don't know have any plans beyond what I'm doing," he said. "But if something interesting comes along I'll do it. If nothing does, I'll look after my dahlias."
Peck is an avid gardener who raises both vegetables and flowers on his four-acre estate in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles.
"I turn some soil myself and plant things," he said. "But I also work on the point system. I point to my garden and say this is where I want a row of such and such."
Peck, 76, won an Academy Award as best actor for "To Kill a Mockingbird" in 1962 and has appeared in such movies as "The Yearling," "Gentleman's Agreement," "Twelve O'Clock High," "The Gunfighter," "Roman Holiday," "Spellbound," "The Guns of Navarone," "Cape Fear," "Old Gringo" and "Other People's Money." He also appeared in the remake of "Cape Fear" as a defense attorney.