SALT LAKE CITY — The man who inspired the title character in the Oscar-winning movie “Rain Man” has died.
Kim Peek was 58. His father, Fran, said Peek had a heart attack Saturday and was pronounced dead at a hospital in the Salt Lake suburb of Murray.
Peek was a savant with a remarkable memory and inspired writer Barry Morrow when he wrote “Rain Man,” the 1988 movie that won four Academy Awards.
Fran Peek said his son met Morrow in the early 1980s and that the writer was taken with Peek’s knack for retaining everything he heard.
Although the character was technically fictional, Fran Peek said his son was every bit as amazing as actor Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal.
Kim toured the world, helping dispel misconceptions about disabilities.
“It was just unbelievable, all the things that he knew,” Fran Peek said Monday.
Kim traveled nearly 3 million air miles, Fran Peek said, and talked to nearly 60 million people, half of them students.
In his later years, Peek was classified as a “mega-savant” who was a genius in about 15 subjects, from history and literature and geography to numbers, sports and music. But his motor skills were limited; he couldn’t perform some simple tasks, such as dressing himself.
NASA scientists had been studying Peek, hoping that technology used to study the effects of space travel on the brain would help explain his mental capabilities.
