Spencer Tracy

Spencer Tracy
Spencer Tracy in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Born	Spencer Bonaventure Tracy
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1922 – 1967
Spouse	Louise Treadwell (1923-1967)
Partner(s)	Katharine Hepburn (1941-1967)

Spencer Bonaventure Tracy (April 5, 1900 – June 10, 1967) was a two-time Academy Award winning actor of stage and screen, who appeared in 74 films from 1930 to 1967. He is generally regarded as one of the finest and most versatile actors in motion picture history. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Tracy among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time, ranking 9th on the list. He was nominated for nine Academy Awards for Best Actor in all. When he was 67 years old, Pixar used his face as an inspiration for Caral Fredrickson, the main character in Pixar's Up (2009 film).

Tracy was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the second son of John Edward Tracy, an Irish American Catholic truck salesman, and Caroline Brown, a Protestant turned Christian Scientist. Tracy's paternal grandparents, John Tracy and Mary Guhin, were born in Ireland. 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 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 left school in spring 1917 to enlist in the Navy with 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 St. Johns Northwestern Military Academy in Delafield, Wisconsin 30 miles west of Milwaukee, but finished his studies at Milwaukee's West Division High School (now Milwaukee High School of the Arts) in February 1921.^[1]

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.^[2] 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).

For several years he performed in stock in Michigan, Canada, and Ohio. 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 him to do Up the River (1930) with Humphrey Bogart for Fox Film Corporation. Shortly after that he and his family moved to Hollywood, where he made over 25 films in five years.

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).

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 (1935-1967) 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 thourhg his post-Fox career (and which would earn him two Academy Awards and nine nominations).^[3]

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.^[4]

During his later years, Tracy's health worsened after he was diagnosed with diabetes, exacerbated by his alcoholism. In 1963, 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. Seventeen days after filming had completed on his last film, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, with Hepburn, he died of a heart attack after suffering from lung congestion. The film was released in December, six months after his death.^[5]

To this day, Tracy remains widely regarded as one of the most skillful actors in motion picture history. He was one of Hollywood's earliest "realistic" actors. Other actors and movie critics have long noted that Tracy's work in films from the 1930s and 1940's frequently look like that of a modern actor interacting with the more stylized and dated performances of everyone around him.

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".^[6]

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.

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.

• 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. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help)
• Swindell, Larry (1969). Spencer Tracy; a Biography. New York: World Pub. Co. OCLC 6078.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Spencer Tracy.

• Spencer Tracy at Find a Grave
• Spencer Tracy at the Internet Broadway Database
• Spencer Tracy at IMDb
• Spencer Tracy at the TCM Movie Database
• Profile @ Turner Classic Movies

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