Biography spencer tracy
Spencer Tracy: A Biography. By James Curtis. Alfred A. Knopf, , 1, pp. $
He&#;s the kind of actor who makes it look so easy and you think to yourself, I can do that. Go ahead and try it. It&#;s not easy and you can&#;t do it.
Spencer Tracy is widely considered to be the greatest film actor of the 20 century. Perhaps even the greatest actor of all time. Clark Gable considered him untouchable. &#;The guy`s good,&#; Gable famously said. &#;There`s nobody in the business who can touch him, and you`re a fool to try. And the bastard knows it, so don`t fall for that humble stuff!&#;
Having recently plowed through mammoth biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Walter Cronkite, two of the seminal figures in the second half of the twentieth century, I decided to complete the triumvirate by reading James Curtis&#;s recent biography of my favorite actor. At almost exactly 1, pages, it&#;s not a fast read, but it&#;s a wonderful journey.
I first encountered Spencer Tracy as a college senior at the University of Georgia in As a journalism major focusing on radio-TV-film production, I took the late great Barry Sherman&#;s class on journalism and broadcast history, and he challenged us to become familiar with the great movies and actors of the past, in the same way one reads “classic” books and authors to become more “well rounded.”
To help us along on that quest, he screened Citizen Kane in class, and before long I was haunting the student center theater for any classic movies that showed up. It was there that I first saw Casablanca and Gone With the Wind, both on the big screen. I was hooked.
Pretty soon I was wearing out my VCR, recording old movies on TBS and AMC (back when they showed old movies on either of those stations), anything that featured Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable. Arsenic and Old Lace led me to Cary Grant, other movies to Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, Edward G. Robinson, Gary Cooper, Errol Flynn, and Katharine Hepburn. I watched Alf
Spencer Tracy
Long before there was Branjelina, there was Spencenkate. The year love affair and nine-film collaboration of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn is probably the one thing most people remember about the man theater legend George M. Cohan called in , at the outset of Tracy's career, “the best goddamned actor I've ever seen.” The tribute was echoed by directors, colleagues, and audiences for the next 41 years.
James Curtis's new biography is designed to end the partial eclipse of Tracy by the more vivid and long-lived Hepburn, though the book's enormous length may be a hindrance. Tracy deserves to be remembered for himself, as a master of acting technique whose essence Hepburn herself defined: “He never got in his own way. I still do.” John Ford, who directed Tracy's first feature film, “Up the River,” and one of his last, “The Last Hurrah,” agreed: “When I say Spencer Tracy is the best actor we ever had, I'm giving you something of my philosophy of acting. The best is most natural. Scenery never gets chewed in my pictures. I prefer actors who can just be.”
Tracy's ability to “just be” is apparent when you think of such contemporaries of his as Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, James Stewart, and James Cagney. All of them are defined to some extent by mannerisms that lend themselves to caricature. But who has ever caricatured or imitated Spencer Tracy? Cagney himself saw this: “I'm easy to imitate, but you never saw anyone imitate Spencer Tracy. You can't mimic reserve and control very well.”
Claudette Colbert, his co-star in “Boom Town,” recalled her big scene, in which she pulled out all the stops: “And after I stop on this high melodramatic note, he nods that big head of his a few times, sticks his chin out, looks up and away and murmurs, 'Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't know about that.' And steals the whole scene! Not a person in the audie
Spencer Tracy
American actor (–)
For the band, see Spencer Tracy (band).
Spencer Bonaventure Tracy (April 5, &#;– June 10, ) was an American actor. He was known for his natural performing style and versatility. One of the major stars of Hollywood's Golden Age, Tracy was the first actor to win two consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor, from nine nominations. During his career, he appeared in 75 films and developed a reputation among his peers as one of the screen's greatest actors. In , the American Film Institute ranked Tracy as the 9th greatest male star of Classic Hollywood Cinema.
Tracy first discovered his talent for acting while attending Ripon College, and he later received a scholarship for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He spent seven years in the theater, working in a succession of stock companies and intermittently on Broadway. His breakthrough came in , when his lead performance in The Last Mile caught the attention of Hollywood. After a successful film debut in John Ford's Up the River (in which he starred with Humphrey Bogart), he was signed to a contract with Fox Film Corporation. Tracy's five years with Fox featured one acting tour de force after another that were usually ignored at the box office, and he remained largely unknown to movie audiences after 25 films, nearly all of them starring him as the leading man. None of them were hits, although his performance in The Power and the Glory () was highly praised at the time.
In , Tracy joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Hollywood's most prestigious studio at the time. His career flourished after his fifth MGM film, Fury (), and in and he won consecutive Oscars for Captains Courageous and Boys Town. Tracy teamed with Clark Gable, MGM's most prominent leading man, for three major box office successes, and by the early s, he was one of MGM's top stars. In , he appeared with Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year, beginning a professional and personal pa
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