Fredric March

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Fredric March

photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 1939.
Birth name Ernest Frederick McIntyre Bickel
Born August 31, 1897
Racine, Wisconsin
Died April 14, 1975 aged 77
Los Angeles, California
Academy Awards
Best Actor
1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
1947 The Best Years of Our Lives

Fredric March (August 31, 1897 – April 14, 1975) was a two-time Academy Award-winning American actor.

Ernest Frederick McIntyre Bickel was born in Racine, Wisconsin. He attended the Winslow Elementary School (established in 1855) and Racine High School. He began a career as a banker, but an emergency appendectomy caused him to reevaluate his life, and in 1920 he began working as an extra in movies made in New York City, using a shortened form of his mother's maiden name, Marcher. He appeared on Broadway in 1926, and by the end of the decade signed a film contract with Paramount Pictures.

March won an Oscar nomination in 1930 for The Royal Family of Broadway, in which he played a role based upon John Barrymore. He won the Oscar for Best Actor in 1932 for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and again in 1946 for The Best Years of Our Lives. In 1954, March hosted the 26th Annual Academy Awards.

March in A Star is Born (1937)
March in A Star is Born (1937)

March was one of the few actors to resist signing long-term contracts with the studios, and was able to freelance and pick and choose his roles, in the process also avoiding typecasting. By this time, he was working on Broadway as often as in Hollywood, and his screen career was not as prolific as it had been.

March, however, won two Best Actor Tony Awards: in 1947 for the play Years Ago, written by Ruth Gordon; and in 1957 for a Broadway production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night.

A friend of playwright Arthur Miller, he was favored by the writer to inaugurate the part of Willy Loman in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Death of a Salesman (1949). Director Elia Kazan cast Lee J. Cobb, however, as Willy Loman, and Arthur Kennedy as his son Biff Loman, two men that the director had worked with in the film Boomerang! (1947). March later played Willy Loman in Columbia Pictures's 1951 film version of the play, directed by Laslo Benedek. Perhaps March's greatest late-in-life role was in Inherit the Wind (1960), opposite Spencer Tracy.

When March underwent surgery for prostate cancer in 1972, it seemed his career was over, yet he managed to give one last great performance in The Iceman Cometh, as the complicated Irish bartender, Harry Hope. Ironically, co-star Robert Ryan was entering the final stages of lung cancer, so the film was shot on a deathwatch.

Fredric March died in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 77 from cancer. He was married to actress Florence Eldridge from 1927 until his death; they had 2 adopted children.

Throughout his life, he and his wife were supporters of the Democratic Party and liberal political causes. His support for the Republican (Second Spanish Republic) side during the Spanish Civil War was particularly controversial.

[edit] Academy Awards and nominations

Preceded by
Lionel Barrymore
for A Free Soul		 Academy Award for Best Actor
1932
for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
co-awardee with Wallace Beery		 Succeeded by
Charles Laughton
for The Private Life of Henry VIII
Preceded by
Ray Milland
for The Lost Weekend		 Academy Award for Best Actor
1946
for The Best Years of Our Lives		 Succeeded by
Ronald Colman
for A Double Life
Preceded by
Bob Hope and Conrad Nagel
25th Academy Awards		 Oscars host
26th Academy Awards (with Donald O'Connor)		 Succeeded by
Bob Hope and Thelma Ritter
27th Academy Awards

[edit] Partial filmography

March has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1616 Vine Street.

[edit] External links

Persondata
NAME March, Fredric
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bickel, Ernest Frederick McIntyre
SHORT DESCRIPTION actor
DATE OF BIRTH August 31, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Racine, Washington
DATE OF DEATH April 14, 1975
PLACE OF DEATH Los Angeles, California
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../f/r/e/Fredric_March_98bd.html"