Spencer Tracy

Actor

  • Born: April 5, 1900
  • Birthplace: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
  • Died: June 10, 1967
  • Place of death: Beverly Hills, Califonira

American actor

Tracy embodied an idealized version of the American male: sturdy, understated, and stoic. He was the dependable man who first played supporting roles with stars such as Clark Gable but then gained his own fame. Among critics and fellow actors, Tracy’s unaffected and apparently effortless style won him accolades as an “actor’s actor.” He also is known for his on- and off-screen relationship with actor Katharine Hepburn.

Area of achievement Film

Early Life

Spencer Tracy (TRAY-see) was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the son of John Tracy, an Irish American Catholic truck salesman, and Caroline Brown, who came from an old American family and was a Christian Scientist. Neither parent, however, seemed to have a lasting impact on Tracy, who spent his early years attending a succession of schools six in all in Wisconsin and Kansas.

At Marquette Academy, a Jesuit school, Tracy met Pat O’Brien (who would later costar with Tracy in several films), and the two young men left school to enlist in the U.S. Navy when the United States entered World War I in 1917. Tracy completed high school after the war and then attended Ripon College in Wisconsin, where he became interested in acting.

Tracy first appeared on the New York stage in 1922, and then married actor Louise Treadwell, with whom he had two children, John and Louise. For the next eight years Tracy appeared in regional theater productions. Then, in 1930, a Hollywood director, John Ford, saw Tracy in a hit Broadway play in the role of a killer and signed him to a Fox Studios contract for Up the River (1930). Tracy performed in more than two dozen films for Fox without distinction. This mediocre record and his alcoholism and womanizing precipitated the studio’s decision to cancel his contract. However, he persisted, signing a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) and winning critical acclaim for his performance in San Francisco (1936), which starred Clark Gable.

Life’s Work

Tracy’s role in San Francisco established him as a film star. Even more important was his new visibility and the growing recognition of his range as an actor. He soon landed the role of the Portuguese fisherman in the filming of the popular Rudyard Kipling novel Captains Courageous (1897), which came out as a film in 1937. He won an Academy Award for Best Actor for that film and then won a second Oscar for his performance of the celebrated Father Flanagan in Boys Town (1938). Tracy played a character that rescued wayward and abandoned boys. This gruff but compassionate man, a practitioner of what might be called “tough love,” made Tracy into an iconic figure, which he amplified playing Father Flanagan again in Men of Boys Town (1941) as well as heralded figures in Stanley and Livingston (1939) and Edison, the Man (1940). In Stanley and Livingston, Tracy played an idealized version of the journalist-explorer Henry M. Stanley looking for the lost missionary David Livingstone in Africa.

Tracy’s energy and commitment as an actor seemed to desert him after his remarkable period of success in the late 1930’s. He considered his work in the double role in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) a failure. His drinking problems persisted, and by this time he was estranged from his wife. Then, in Woman of the Year (1942), director George Stevens paired him with Katharine Hepburn. Both on and off screen, the couple was electrifying: Tracy’s understated and sometimes dour personality was the perfect foil for Hepburn’s ebullient and sometimes even strident temperament. They had a way of both highlighting and forgiving each other’s faults while obviously admiring one another’s strengths. A second pairing in Keeper of the Flame (1942) featured Tracy as a dogged reporter exposing the crimes of a recently dead “great man.”

Tracy’s career revived as his talent for comedy became obvious opposite Hepburn in State of the Union (1948) and in the apotheosis of their relationship in Adam’s Rib (1949), written by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin especially for Tracy and Hepburn. By this time, Tracy had developed a sort of crusty humor that challenged Hepburn’s high opinion of herself. As dueling attorneys and as a married couple, the actors presented what seemed like a version of their private lives on screen. Although Tracy was still married, his off-screen liaison with Hepburn was well known. A slap of her backside in Adam’s Rib sent reverberations that seemed to conflate their on-screen and off-screen lives. Pat and Mike (1952) built on the reputations of this iconic couple, allowing Tracy, who by this time was beginning to show his age, to make the transition to an older version of himself no longer in competition with Hepburn but serving as her manager (she plays an athletic golfer).

Tracy’s final spurt of creativity is apparent in films such as Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), The Last Hurrah (1958), and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). However, his iconic status was reinforced with The Old Man and the Sea (1958) and Inherit the Wind (1960). In The Old Man and the Sea he played the enduring Cuban fisherman, a mythic figure in Ernest Hemingway’s allegorical 1952 novel of the same name. In Inherit the Wind, Tracy played the famous attorney Clarence Darrow, lead defense counsel in the controversial Scopes trial in Tennessee in 1925. Darrow matched wits with prosecutor William Jennings Bryan and ridiculed Bryan’s fundamentalist belief that the world was created in six days.

Tracy’s last film, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), paired him once again with Hepburn. In the film they are a married couple trying to come to terms with their daughter’s decision to marry a black man (Sidney Poitier). Tracy plays the resistant father, a foil to the tractable mother, played by Hepburn. When Tracy finally comes around to his wife’s point of view, he delivers a speech that essentially says what matters is that his daughter and her fiancé love one another. It is a sentimental speech in a sentimental film, but it clinched Tracy’s aura as a person of decency and integrity. Also, Hepburn won the Oscar for Best Actress for her role in this film.

Tracy died on June 10, 1967, in Beverly Hills, California, shortly after the filming of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. He had been ailing for some time and the film had been carefully planned to accommodate his poor health. The film brought a storybook close to not only his film career but also his relationship with Hepburn.

Significance

In his greatest roles, Tracy seemed to be playing himself. This is often said of film stars, but in his case, something about his unassuming affect, his mordant sense of humor with an understated touch of affection for his targets, endeared him to not only his audiences but also fellow actors. He was Hepburn’s idea of what it meant to be “manly,” a term she often used to describe Tracy.

Tracy had tremendous range as a film star who could play both good and evil characters, although like most movie stars he gravitated toward virtuous roles. He projected a stoic persona, however, that went far beyond what he was able to maintain off screen. Stoics do not drown themselves in drink as Tracy did, but it is a tribute to his acting skills that no hint of his angst or self-doubt and sometimes self-loathing ever surfaced on film.

After the signature roles of the 1930’s, Tracy’s importance shifted to roles that helped to define the relationship between modern men and women. On the one hand, he could seem old-fashioned, reluctant to change. On the other hand, his receptivity to Hepburn’s activism brought out a more capacious sensibility that his more obviously heroic roles never permitted him to express. His willingness to test the limits of his own masculinist perspective is perhaps his highest achievement, for it endowed him with a kind of greatness that he was quite willing to put to the test of the values of another, that is, Hepburn.

Bibliography

Anderson, Christopher. An Affair to Remember: The Remarkable Love Story of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. New York: William Morrow, 1997. A much more complete account of the Hepburn and Tracy relationship than can be found in Garson Kanin’s memoir. Anderson draws on interviews with Hepburn, her friends, and with actors who worked with Tracy. Includes notes, bibliography, and index.

Berg, A. Scott. Kate Remembered. New York: Penguin, 2003. Biographer Berg, a close friend of Hepburn, describes several episodes in which she discusses her relationship with Tracy. Even those who are well versed in the other books on the subject will find new material in this sensitive portrayal of what Tracy meant to Hepburn.

Davidson, Bill. Spencer Tracy: Tragic Idol. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1987. A short biography written with the cooperation of some of Tracy’s friends and associates, most notably Stanley Kramer, who directed Tracy in several films. Includes a filmography and index.

Fisher, James. Spencer Tracy: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. An indispensable resource, including a biographical essay; discussions of individual performances on stage, screen, radio, and television; plot synopses; reviews; lists of casts and credits; and a detailed annotation of other sources on Tracy’s life and career.

Kanin, Garson. Tracy and Hepburn: An Intimate Memoir. New York: Viking Press, 1971. Coauthor of Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike, Kanin provides a look into his friendship with Tracy and Hepburn. His book codified the public’s attraction to this iconic couple.

1901-1940: 1934-1938: Production Code Gives Birth to Screwball Comedy.

1941-1970: 1946-1962: Westerns Dominate Postwar American Film.