“If I feel moved to express myself, thereon it will get out all over Monroeville that I am a member of the NAACP. “I don’t trust myself to keep my mouth shut,” Lee told a friend. In many ways, her experience echoed the discomfort Lee felt when she returned to Monroeville, Ala., after several years in New York, where she penned “Mockingbird.” As Badham told the El Paso Times in 2012, “Everything in California was so different.” When she returned home from five months in Hollywood, she said, she was no longer welcome in friends’ homes, for fear of what she might have picked up out west. Though they didn’t hurt her, Birmingham’s casual racism did.
Everett Collection Badham with writer Harper Lee on the set of “Mockingbird.” Everett Collection As he told brothers Tom and Jim Goldrup for their 2002 book, “ Growing Up on the Set,” Badham used to mimic his lines so much, “I had to eat lunch 26 times and breakfast 22 times because of Mary.”Īnd so, when she wriggled into the tire that he and John Megna’s Dill rolled down the street, Alford said they were out for blood: “We tried to kill her, but we were too small and couldn’t get the tire going fast enough.” Things weren’t so cozy between Mary Badham and Phillip Alford when they filmed “To Kill a Mockingbird” in 1961. “We despised each other,” Alford recalled. There, the mischievous girl and 13-year-old Phillip Alford, who played her saintly big brother, battled offstage and on. And since the “Mockingbird” producers suspected it wasn’t safe to shoot a paean to civil rights in 1960s Alabama, cast and crew decamped to California, where the sleepy town of Maycomb was created on the studio’s back lot. “What are the chances the child will get the part, anyway?” Luckily, her mom, an actress in an amateur theater company, was able to change the retired Air Force general’s mind. “And, of course, my dad said no!” Badham told the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She wanted to bring Mary to audition, but couldn’t do it without her husband’s permission. Fred Prouser/Reutersm marked its 50th anniversary in 2012, Badham recalled that long-ago day when her mother heard that “movie people” were coming to Birmingham. Everett Collectionīadham, Peck and Alford reunited in ’97 when Peck was presented with a lifetime achievement award. Mary Badham remained close with Gregory Peck (center) and Phillip Alford (right) after filming “To Kill a Mockingbird” in 1962. “I always called him Atticus, and he still called me Scout right up to the end,” she said. As Badham told London’s Telegraph in 2012, the courtly actor guided and encouraged her until his death in 2003. The two remained close long after the cameras stopped rolling. She’ll read excerpts from both books Tuesday night at the 92nd Street Y’s Poetry Center, after which she might just answer the $6 million question: How did the kindly Atticus of “Mockingbird” turn into the bigoted old man of “Watchman”? And how, does she reckon, would Peck have taken the news? And she’s spent most of the past five decades talking about “Mockingbird” and its lessons of social justice. Now 62 and living in Pennsylvania, the mother of two retired from acting as a teenager, opting instead for an education. Gregory Peck made no secret of how he felt about playing Atticus Finch, the compassionate small-town lawyer of “Mockingbird.” It was, he often said, his favorite part, though he went on to play many others.īut for Mary Badham - the Alabama 10-year-old cast as his tomboyish daughter - playing Scout defined her life. If there’s ever a film made of “ Go Set a Watchman” - Harper Lee’s wildly anticipated novel, out Tuesday - it will lack the very thing that made 1962’s “ To Kill a Mockingbird” an instant classic: children.Īnd not just any kids growing up in the racially charged Alabama of the 1930s, when “Mockingbird” is set, but Scout and Jem Finch and their geeky neighbor, Dill. Phillip Alford (from left), Mary Badham and John Megna in between scenes on the 1962 set of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Everett Collection Mary Badham played Scout.
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