Gregory Peck throws party for Kerry cousins

June 1992

THE Ashe, Curran and Prendeville cameras never clicked so busily as the night that Hollywood star Gregory Peck played host to all his West Kerry cousins at the Sceilig Hotel in Dingle.

“I counted thirty-eight of them,”’ said a delighted Gregory afterwards as he reflected on the night.

“It was very special to me to be able to meet so many of my relations in the one place at the one time. I had no idea that I shared blood with so many people — and all of them pretty closely related.”

The 76 years old Hollywood veteran posed with them all over and over again as the cameras recorded what was for most of them their first meeting with their famous cousin.

And nobody was more enthusiastic about the meeting than Gregory’s daughter, Cecelia.

She wanted to meet all her relations and pulled back the table in the room set aside for the gathering to make sure that there would be one picture of everybody.

Cecelia, also an actress, has taken part in six films, the last of them with her father in Fainting Churches, a movie in which they play father and daughter with Lauren-Bacall as the wife and mother.

Gregory and Veronique, his wife for 37 years, enjoyed a stroll around Dingle the morning after the party and dropped in on Tom and Kate Ashe in their Main Street pub before motoring south to Parknasilla for a night,

They stopped in Cahersiveen where the star wanted to visit the grave of Monsignor Hugh Q’ Flaherty, the Kerry priest whose wartime exploits in Rome inspired The Scarlet and the Black, a film in which he played the lead part.

“The Ring of Kerry was operatic and the Lakes of Killarney enthralling,” Gregory said later.

“We certainly want, to come back and see more of Kerry and Ireland.’

And it will be sooner rather than later,” he said mindful of the fact, that it had been 24 years since his previous visit to the county.