Gregory Peck

Whether he was playing a demented Captain Ahab or a saintly Atticus Finch, careening through a Dali nightmare or being stalked by a psychopath, Gregory Peck has always made moviegoers feel good--vaguely inferior, perhaps, but always good.

When three stars turn up to testify before Congress, it's enough to cause a traffic jam on Capitol Hill. When clusters of them showed up in Washington this weekend for the Kennedy Center Honors--the nation's highest tribute to performing artists--Washington cleared the streets and turned out in its best tuxedos and dresses.

The New England mill owner whose factory and thus whose life's work is under siege by the Wall Street marauder played by Danny DeVito in "Other People's Money" is an All-American prototype. He's a standing symbol of an earlier, self-reliant time, stalwart, hickory hard but compassionate, the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments rolled into one. He is as out of place in the cutthroat world of modern high finance as Ralph Waldo Emerson would be at a disco.

For all of you thinking about filing a missing persons report on Dean Jones, don't bother. After a 10-year absence, the actor who made a name for himself in such Disney fluff as "The Love Bug" and "That Darn Cat" has returned to the big screen. About the hiatus, Jones insists it was not self-imposed. "Believe me, it wasn't by choice," says the native of Decatur, Ala. "It's just that it was hard to convince anybody that I could do anything other than the kind of shallow characters I had been doing."

The voice on the phone was as rich, deep and mellifluous as a voice from the heavens. It was like a great organ in a medieval cathedral. You imagine God sounds like this. Reassuring, soothing, commanding. So, you didn't have to say, "Who's calling, please?" It was either God, Moses or General MacArthur. Or Gregory Peck. Any moviegoer would recognize the voice in an instant. It is one of the great instruments given to any actor, as easy on the ears as a sonata by Beethoven.