April 21, 2011 - Spencer Tracy

  

 
 (Spencer Tracy was one of my favorite actors and the clip below is from the last few minutes of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", and the year 1967. The film was eventually remade but the quality of the script and the actors was nowhere near the original. Tracy died 2 days after wrapping the film and the dedication to work ethic and his professionalism shows clearly in the speech he gives at the end. He did it in one take and from the look in his eyes when he glances at Katherine Hepburn, he understood he had a limited amount of time left.)

Spencer Bonaventure Tracy (April 5, 1900 – June 10, 1967) was an American theatrical and film actor, who appeared in 75 films from 1930 to 1967. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Tracy ninth among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time. He was nominated for nine Academy Awards for Best Actor in all, winning two. While in college, Tracy decided on acting as a career. He studied acting in New York and appeared in a number of Broadway plays, finally achieving success in the 1930 hit The Last Mile. Director John Ford was impressed by his performance and cast him in Up the River with Humphrey Bogart. Fox Film Corporation signed him to a long term contract, but after five years of mostly undistinguished films, he joined the most prestigious movie studio of the time, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where his career flourished. He won back-to-back Academy Awards for Captains Courageous (1937) and Boys Town (1938). In 1942, he co-starred with Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year. The teaming lasted for decades, both on-screen and off. They fell in love and maintained an affair that lasted for decades. (Tracy was already married and, as a Catholic, would not consider divorce despite affairs with actresses like Loretta Young, Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy, Ingrid Bergman and Gene Tierney) One of the greatest of cinematic couples, they made eight more films together, ending in 1967's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which was completed shortly before his death. 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. He was raised a Roman Catholic.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 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. Tracy attended Ripon College from February 1921 to April 1922.  Ripon he made his first stage appearance, in a 1921 Commencement play entitled The Truth, and decided on acting as a career. 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). John Tracy died at age 82 at his son's ranch in Acton, California, in 200He 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)  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)  During his later years, Tracy's health worsened after he was diagnosed with diabetes, exacerbated by his alcoholism. On 21 July 1963, less than eight months after finishing the filming of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Tracy suffered a congested lung condition, 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 10 June 1967, two days after completing 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.  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"  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).  Spencer Tracy -"Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?"