Gregory Peck Revealed His Affair With This Co-Star, Years After She Died
"I was young. She was young. We were involved for weeks in close and intense work," he admitted.
It's reveals like this that one make you wonder what other secrets old Hollywood still holds. In 1987, when he was 71, Gregory Peck confessed that he had an affair with a co-star over 40 years earlier. The actor and his equally famous castmate appeared together in an Alfred Hitchcock film, and while Peck didn't share any details, we do know that both actors were married at the time. As Peck put it, "I was young. She was young." Read on to find out which co-star Peck was talking about and what else happened between them.
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They worked together on a 1945 film.
In 1945, Peck starred in the Hitchcock thriller Spellbound opposite Ingrid Bergman. He played the director of a psychiatric hospital with a mysterious past while she played a psychiatrist at the hospital, who ends up analyzing the director herself and falling in love with him.
Both stars were married.
At the time that they filmed Spellbound, Bergman and Peck were both married—to other people. Bergman had married doctor Petter Lindström in 1937, and they had a daughter, Pia Lindström, born in 1938. As for Peck, he had been married to Greta Kukkonen since 1942. The couple ended up having three children together, but as of 1945 they had welcomed just one son, Jonathan Peck.
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Peck confirmed an affair… indirectly.
In 1987, Peck was interviewed by People magazine, and he essentially confirmed that he had an affair with Bergman. But he didn't share much beyond that. Journalist Brad Darrach wrote that, while asking Peck about his leading ladies, "when mention is made of Ingrid Bergman, his co-star in Spellbound, he begins to blather."
Peck said of Bergman, "Now we get into an area where I can't answer. All I can say is I had a real love for her, and I think that's where I ought to stop. Except to say she was like a lovely Swedish rose. I was young. She was young. We were involved for weeks in close and intense work."
Rumors had followed them for years prior to that.
According to Gregory Peck: A Biography by Gary Fishgall, there was a long-standing rumor that Peck and Bergman had an affair during filming of their movie. He wrote that anonymous co-worker on Spellbound told Bergman biographer Laurence Leamer that one day "Ingrid and Peck came in late, all disheveled," which led to "a lot of speculation."
Fishgall's book also notes that Peck once said of his co-star, "I think you fall in love a little bit with a woman like Ingrid Bergman. I don't think there's any way to avoid it, for she was incredibly beautiful, and a very sweet person … Her lovely skin kind of took your breath away, and her whole radiance was something to behold."
Bergman and Peck both remarried later.
After his affair on Spellbound, Peck remained married to Kukkonen until 1955. That same year, he married journalist Veronique Passani, with whom he welcomed two children and remained married to until his death.
Bergman divorced Lindström in 1950 amid an affair with director Roberto Rossellini, which became quite the Hollywood scandal leading to the actor receiving hate mail from her fans. Regardless, Bergman and Rossellini married the same year, and the couple welcomed three children together before divorcing in 1957. Bergman then married her third husband, producer Lars Schmidt, in 1958 and remained with him until 1975.
At the time that Peck revealed the affair with Bergman, it was five years after Bergman's death at age 67 in 1982. Peck himself passed away in 2003 at 87 years old.
