Spencer Tracy

Spencer Tracy
Spencer Tracy in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941)
Born	Spencer Bonaventure Tracy April 5, 1900(1900-04-05) Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.
Died	June 10, 1967(1967-06-10) (aged 67) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1922–1967
Spouse	Louise Treadwell (1923-1967)
Partner	Katharine Hepburn (1941-1967)

Spencer Bonaventure Tracy (April 5, 1900 – June 10, 1967) was an American theatrical and film actor, who appeared in 74 films from 1930 to 1967. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Tracy 9th among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time. He was nominated for nine Academy Awards for Best Actor in all, winning two.

Early life

Tracy was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,^[1] the second son of John Edward Tracy, an Irish American Catholic truck salesman, and Caroline Brown, a Protestant turned Christian Scientist. He was raised a Roman Catholic.^[2] Tracy's paternal grandparents, John Tracy and Mary Guhin, were born in Ireland.^[3] His mother's ancestry dates back to Thomas Stebbins, who immigrated from England in the late 1630s. Tracy attended six high schools, starting with Wauwatosa East High School in 1915 and St. John's Cathedral School for boys in Milwaukee the following year. The Tracy family then moved to Kansas City, where Spencer was enrolled at St. Mary's College, Kansas, a boarding school in St. Marys, Kansas 30 miles west of Topeka, Kansas, then transferred to Rockhurst, a Jesuit academy in Kansas City, Missouri. John Tracy's job in Kansas City did not work out, and the family returned to Milwaukee six months after their departure. Spencer was enrolled at Marquette Academy, another Jesuit school, where he met fellow actor Pat O'Brien. The two young men left school in spring 1917 to enlist in the Navy after the American entry into World War I, but Tracy remained in Norfolk Navy Yard, Virginia, throughout the war. Afterwards, Tracy continued his high school education at Marquette Academy then transferred to Northwestern Military and Naval Academy near Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. He finished his last few credits needed to graduate at Milwaukee's West Division High School (now Milwaukee High School of the Arts) in February 1921.^[3]

Afterward he attended Ripon College where he appeared in a leading role in a play entitled The Truth, and decided on acting as a career. Tracy received an honorary degree from Ripon College in 1940.^[4] While touring the Northeast with the Ripon debate team, he auditioned for and was accepted to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. His first Broadway role was as a robot in Karel Čapek's R.U.R. (1922), followed by five other Broadway plays in the 1920s. In 1923 he married actress Louise Treadwell. They had two children, John and Louise (Susie).

Career

Henry Drummond (Tracy, left) and Matthew Harrison Brady (March, right) in Inherit the Wind

Tracy performed in stock in Michigan, Canada, and Ohio for several years. Finally in 1930 he appeared in a hit play on Broadway, The Last Mile. Director John Ford saw Tracy in The Last Mile and signed Tracy for Up the River (1930) with Humphrey Bogart for Fox Film Corporation. Shortly after that Tracy and his family moved to Hollywood: 25 films in the next five years featured him.

In 1935, Tracy signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor two years in a row, for Captains Courageous (1937) and Boys Town (1938).

Tracy with Katharine Hepburn in the trailer for the film Adam's Rib (1949)

He was also nominated for San Francisco (1936), Father of the Bride (1950), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), The Old Man and the Sea (1958), Inherit the Wind (1960), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), and posthumously for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967). Tracy and Laurence Olivier share the record for the most nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Tracy's reputation for versatility and naturalness are based on the twenty years (1935-1955) he acted at Metro Goldwyn Mayer and for the subsequent dozen years when he was an independent actor. Yet the twenty-five films he made prior to his move to MGM are notable in that they demonstrate the range and diversity of characters he would continue to deliver through his post-Fox career (and which would earn him two Academy Awards and nine nominations).^[5]

Tracy and Hepburn

In 1941, during the filming of Woman of the Year, Tracy began a relationship with Katharine Hepburn. Their relationship, which neither would discuss publicly, lasted until Tracy's death in 1967. Their relationship was complex and there were periods during which they were estranged. During one estrangement, Tracy had a brief romance with actress Gene Tierney while filming the Plymouth Adventure in 1952.^[6][7][8]

Death and legacy

During his later years, Tracy's health worsened after he was diagnosed with diabetes, exacerbated by his alcoholism. In July 1963, a few months after filming It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, he suffered a heart attack, forcing him to pull out of Cheyenne Autumn and The Cincinnati Kid. Edward G. Robinson replaced him for both films. He spent most of the next four years inactive as his health further declined. On June 10, 1967, seventeen days after filming had been completed on his last film, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, with Hepburn, Spencer Tracy died of a heart attack at age 67, having long suffered from emphysema since the early 1950s from his daily smoking habit. The film was released in December, six months after his death.^[9]

In 1988, the University of California, Los Angeles' Campus Events Commission and Susie Tracy created the UCLA Spencer Tracy Award. The award has been given to actors in recognition for their achievement in film acting. Past recipients include William Hurt, James Stewart, Michael Douglas, Denzel Washington, Tom Hanks, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Jodie Foster, Harrison Ford, Anjelica Huston, Nicolas Cage, Kirk Douglas, Jack Lemmon and Morgan Freeman.

The main character Carl from Pixar's film Up was primarily based on a combination of Spencer Tracy and Walter Matthau, because, according to director Pete Docter, there was "something sweet about these grumpy old guys".^[10]

Filmography and awards

Tracy appeared in 75 feature films, and several short films. With Katharine Hepburn he starred in nine feature films, one of the most successful screen pairings in film history.

Nine of the films he starred in were nominated for Best Picture: San Francisco (Oscar Nomination), Libeled Lady, Captains Courageous (Oscar), Test Pilot, Boys Town (Oscar), Father of the Bride (Oscar Nomination), Judgment at Nuremberg (Oscar Nomination), How the West Was Won and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (Oscar Nomination).

He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor on nine occasions, and won the award in 1937, for Captains Courageous, and in 1938, for Boys Town. He won a Golden Globe Award for The Actress (1953) from a total of four nominations. He was awarded a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his posthumously released performance opposite Hepburn in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967).

One of his Oscars was mistakenly inscribed to Dick Tracy before being corrected.

See also

• 1930 in film
• 1967 in film

References

Bibliography

• Dandola, John (2001). Dead at the Box Office. Glen Ridge, NJ: Quincannon. ISBN 1878452258.  Tracy is a character in this murder-mystery set against the 1940 World Premiere of Edison, the Man.
• Kanin, Garson (1971). Tracy and Hepburn; an intimate memoir. New York: Viking. ISBN 0670722936. 
• Fisher, James (1994). Spencer Tracy: a Bio-bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0313287279. 
• New England Vintage Film Society, Inc. (2008). Spencer Tracy: The Pre-Code Legacy of a Hollywood Legend. Newton, MA: New England Vintage Film Society. ISBN 978-1-4363-4138-7. 
• Swindell, Larry (1969). Spencer Tracy; a Biography. New York: World Pub. Co.. OCLC 6078. 

External links

• Spencer Tracy at Find a Grave
• Spencer Tracy at the Internet Broadway Database
• Spencer Tracy at the Internet Movie Database
• Spencer Tracy at the TCM Movie Database
• Profile @ Turner Classic Movies
• Chang, David A. "Spencer Tracy's Boyhood: Truth, Fiction, and Hollywood Dreams," Wisconsin Magazine of History, vol. 84, no. 1 (Autumn 2000)