Fredric March (August 31, 1897 – April 14, 1975) was an American two-time Academy Award and Tony Award-winning stage and film actor.
March was born Ernest Frederick McIntyre Bickel in Racine, Wisconsin, the son of Cora Brown Marcher and John F. Bickel. He attended the Winslow Elementary School (established in 1855), Racine High School, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he was a member of Alpha Delta Phi. He began a career as a banker, but an emergency appendectomy caused him to reevaluate his life, and in 1920 he began working as an extra in movies made in New York City, using a shortened form of his mother's maiden name, Marcher. He appeared on Broadway in 1926, and by the end of the decade signed a film contract with Paramount Pictures.
March won an Oscar nomination in 1930 for The Royal Family of Broadway, in which he played a role based upon John Barrymore. He won the Oscar for Best Actor in 1932 for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and again in 1946 for The Best Years of Our Lives. On March 25, 1954, March co-hosted the 26th Annual Academy Awards ceremony from New York City, with co-host Donald O'Connor in Los Angeles.
March in A Star is Born (1937)
March was one of the few actors to resist signing long-term contracts with the studios, and was able to freelance and pick and choose his roles, in the process also avoiding typecasting. By this time, he was working on Broadway as often as in Hollywood, and his screen career was not as prolific as it had been.
March, however, won two Best Actor Tony Awards: in 1947 for the play Years Ago, written by Ruth Gordon; and in 1957 for his performance as James Tyrone in the original Broadway production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night.
March's neighbor in Connecticut, playwright Arthur Miller, was thought to favor March to inaugurate the part of Willy Loman in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Death of a Salesman (1949). However, March read the play and turned down the role, whereupon director Elia Kazan cast Lee J. Cobb as Willy, and Arthur Kennedy as one of Willy's sons, Biff Loman, two men that the director had worked with in the film Boomerang (1947). March later regretted turning down the role and finally played Willy Loman in Columbia Pictures's 1951 film version of the play, directed by Laslo Benedek. Perhaps March's greatest late-in-life role was in Inherit the Wind (1960), opposite Spencer Tracy.
in Inherit the Wind (1960)
When March underwent surgery for prostate cancer in 1972, it seemed his career was over, yet he managed to give one last great performance in The Iceman Cometh (1973), as the complicated Irish bartender, Harry Hope. Coincidentally, co-star Robert Ryan was entering the final stages of lung cancer, so the film was the last for both March and Ryan.
March has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1616 Vine Street.
Although March died in Los Angeles, California at the age of 77 from cancer, he considered the rural Litchfield County town of New Milford, Connecticut his primary residence since the 1930s. This property was subsequently home to American playwright Lillian Hellman as well as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. March was married to actress Florence Eldridge from 1927 until his death, and they had two adopted children.
Throughout his life, he and his wife were supporters of the Democratic Party and liberal political causes. His support for the Republican (Second Spanish Republic) side during the Spanish Civil War was particularly controversial.
