Fredric March biography

Synopsis

Profile

March developed his interest in acting while a student at the University of Wisconsin. After graduating in 1920, he moved to New York City to work in a bank, but he soon began to pursue a career in acting. For the next six years March accepted numerous small roles in plays and in films before landing his first Broadway leading role in The Devil in the Cheese (1926). While appearing in a stock company, he met actress Florence Eldridge, who became his wife in 1927. In the decades that followed, they built a reputation as a prominent theatrical team.

March's parody of John Barrymore in a 1928 touring production of The Royal Family earned him a five-year contract with Paramount Pictures, and he received his first Academy Award nomination for reprising the Barrymore role in the retitled screen adaptation, The Royal Family of Broadway (1930). His best-known film performance from his early years was a dual role in the horror classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931); it won March his first Academy Award.

His Paramount contract, which expired in 1933, was March's only long-term studio contract; for the remainder of his lengthy career, he freelanced—a rarity in the days of the Hollywood studio system. Throughout the next decade, he created memorable roles in films for various studios, most notably The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), Death Takes a Holiday (1934), Les Misérables (1935), Anthony Adverse (1936), Nothing Sacred (1937), A Star Is Born (1937; his third Oscar-nominated performance), The Buccaneer (1938), Bedtime Story (1941), I Married a Witch (1942), and The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944).

In 1942 March returned to Broadway in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, and for the rest of his career he alternated between Hollywood films and the New York stage. He needed little training to adapt his skills to either medium, instinctively knowing if a gesture or facial expression was too broad for the screen or too subtle for the stage. March disdained the internal “method” approach to his craft. Upon accepting a script, he learned his lines quickly so that he had time to absorb the nuances of each word. This cerebral approach occasionally resulted in stolid, emotionally unconvincing performances (especially during his younger years when he was often cast in one-dimensional leading man roles), but it more often produced