Quick Facts
- NAME: Spencer Bonaventure Tracy
- OCCUPATION: Film Actor, Theater Actor
- BIRTH DATE: April 05, 1900
- DEATH DATE: June 10, 1967
- EDUCATION: Northwestern Military and Naval Academy, Ripon College, American Academy of Dramatic Arts, New York City
- PLACE OF BIRTH: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
- PLACE OF DEATH: Los Angeles, California
Best Known For
Spencer Tracy was one of Hollywood's greatest film stars. He appeared in 75 films from 1930 to 1967 and was nominated for fine Oscars (winning two).
Spencer Tracy. (2012). Biography.com. Retrieved 01:11, Feb 09, 2012 from http://www.biography.com/people/spencer-tracy-9509626
Spencer Tracy [Internet]. 2012. http://www.biography.com/people/spencer-tracy-9509626, February 09
" Spencer Tracy." 2012. Biography.com 09 Feb 2012, 01:11 http://www.biography.com/people/spencer-tracy-9509626
' Spencer Tracy', Biography.com,(2012) http://www.biography.com/people/spencer-tracy-9509626 [accessed Feb 09, 2012]
" Spencer Tracy," Biography.com, http://www.biography.com/people/spencer-tracy-9509626 (accessed Feb 09, 2012).
Spencer Tracy [Internet]. Biography.com; 2012 [cited 2012 Feb 09]. Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/spencer-tracy-9509626.
Spencer Tracy, http://www.biography.com/people/spencer-tracy-9509626 (last visited Feb 09, 2012).
Spencer Tracy, http://www.biography.com/people/spencer-tracy-9509626 (last visited Feb 09, 2012).
Synopsis
Contents
(born , April 5, 1900, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.—died June 10, 1967, Beverly Hills, California) rough-hewn American film star who was one of Hollywood's greatest male leads and the first actor to receive two consecutive Academy Awards for best actor.
As a youth Tracy was bored by schoolwork and joined the navy at age 17. Despite his distaste for academics, he eventually became a premed student at Wisconsin's Ripon College. While there, he auditioned for and won a role in the commencement play and discovered acting to be more to his liking than medicine. In 1922 he went to New York, where he and his friend Pat O'Brien enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. That same year, both men made their joint Broadway debut, playing bit roles as robots in Karel apek's R.U.R. For the next eight years, Tracy bounced between featured parts in short-running Broadway plays and leading roles in regional stock companies, finally achieving stardom when he was cast as death-row inmate Killer Mears in the 1930 Broadway hit The Last Mile. He subsequently appeared in two Vitaphone short subjects, but he was displeased with himself and pessimistic about his chances for screen stardom.
Nevertheless, director John Ford hired Tracy to star in the 1930 feature film Up the River, which resulted in a five-year stay at Fox Studios in Hollywood. Although few of his Fox films were memorable—excepting perhaps Me and My Gal (1932), 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932), and The Power and the Glory (1933)—his tenure at the studio enabled him to develop his uncanny ability to act without ever appearing to be acting. His friend Humphrey Bogart once attempted to describe the elusive Tracy technique: “[You] don't see the mechanism working, the wheels turning. He covers up. He never overacts or is hammy. He makes you believe what he is playing.” For his part, Tracy always denied that he had come up with any sort of magic formula. Whenever he was asked the secret of great acting, he usually snapped, “Learn your lines!”
In 1935 he was signed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he would do some of his best work, beginning with his harrowing performance as a lynch-mob survivor in Fritz Lang's Fury (1936). He received his first of nine Oscar nominations for San Francisco (1936) and became the first actor to win two consecutive Academy Awards, for Captains Courageous (1937) and Boys Town (1938). In the course of his two decades at MGM he settled gracefully into character leads, conveying everything from paternal bemusement in Father of the Bride (1950) to grim determination in Bad Day at
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