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MarchBorn August 31, 1997 in Racine, Wisconsin to John and Cora Bickel née Marcher, the future Fredric March was a rising banker with First National City (now Citibank) when an emergency appendectomy caused him to re-evaluate his life. An extra on screen from 1921, the year of his first marriage, he was on Broadway from 1924 on. Divorced from first wife Ellis Baker in 1927, he then married actress Florence Eldredge with whom he would remain married for the remainder of his life. The two moved to Hollywood in 1929 where both enjoyed long careers interspersed with stage work with and without each other.

In starring roles in fourteen films in his first two years, he earned his first Oscar nominations for 1930’s The Royal Family of Broadway in which he hilariously impersonated John Barrymore. His second nomination for the following year’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde resulted in his first win.

March continued to be one of the busiest of lead actors through the 1930s in such films as Merrily We Go to Hell, The Sign of the Cross, Design for Living, Death Takes a Holiday, The Affairs of Cellini, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Les Misérables, Anna Karenina, The Dark Angel, Mary of Scotland, Anthony Adverse, A Star Is Born (for which he received his third Oscar nomination), The Buccaneer and Trade Winds.

The early 1940s provided him with further leading man opportunities in such hits as Susan and God, So Ends Our Night, One Foot in Heaven, I Married a Witch, The Adventures of Mark Twain and Tomorrow the World!. His performance in 1946’s The Best Years of Our Lives earned him a second lead actor Oscar, a feat accomplished only once before by Spencer Tracy in 1938.

March gave memorable performances later in the decade in Another Part of the Forest and An Act of Murder and earned his fifth Oscar nomination for 1951’s Death of a Salesman.

Now a star character actor, March gave some of his finest performances in such 1950s films as Executive Suite, The Bridges at Toko-Ri and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. After winning a 1957 Tony for Broadway’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night opposite his Tony nominated wife, March was once again a bona fide major star and proved his star power in such films as Middle of the Night, Inherit the Wind and Seven Days in May.

March’s last screen role was in 1973’s The Iceman Cometh. He died of prostate cancer in 1975 at the age of 75. Eldredge, last on the big screen opposite March in Inherit the Wind, had one more role as Mary Tyler Moore’s mother in the 1978 TV movie, First, You Cry. She died in 1988 at 86.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE. (1931), directed by Rouben Mamoulian

Based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella and T.R. Sullivan’s 1887 play, this was the 11th of numerous screen versions of the venerable property.

Mamoulian’s pre-Code classic is still admired today for its how-did-they-do-that on-screen transformation of March from the kindly Dr. Jekyll to the evil Mr. Hyde and for the level of sexuality presented by March as Hyde and Miriam Hopkins as the prostitute Ivy. No other version before or since has matched these two elements.

March’s Oscar win would be the only lead actor award for a horror film until Anthony Hopkins matched the feat nearly sixty years later in 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs. Although classified as a tie with Wallace Beery in The Champ, March actually received three votes more than Beery but Louis B. Mayer, producer of Beery’s film, used his considerable influence to have a tie declared due to the closeness of the vote.

THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES. (1946), directed by William Wyler

Wyler’s classic drama of homecoming servicemen is still the barometer by which all such films are measured. March as the Army Sergeant returning to his job as a banker heads a perfect cast that includes Myrna Loy as his loving wife; Teresa Wright as his forthright daughter; Dana Andrews as the heroic pilot returning to his pre-war job as a soda jerk; Virginia Mayo as Andrews’ faithless wife; Harold Russell as an amputee and Cathy O’Donnell as Russell’s girl-next-door sweetheart. March’s moving speech at a banquet in which he is being honored was one of the highlights in a film that had many.

With his Oscar win for this performance, March became only the second to win two awards in the lead actor category following in the footsteps of Spencer Tracy who accomplished the feat with his back-to-back Oscars for Captains Courageous and Boys Town.

INHERIT THE WIND (1960), directed by Stanley Kramer

The first two double Best Actor winners, Spencer Tracy and March, lent their considerable talents to playing thinly disguised versions of famed lawyer Clarence Darrow and three time Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan in this still riveting rendering of the Scopes monkey trial in which a Southern science teacher is put on trial for teaching evolution.

Tracy received an Oscar nomination for his dynamic portrayal of the agnostic lawyer who takes on the legendary politician, but March is equally fascinating as the blowhard buffoon at the end of his tether. The British were more taken with March’s performance and honored him with a BAFTA nomination over Tracy.

SEVEN DAYS IN MAY (1964), directed by John Frankenheimer

Who else but March, in a Golden Globe nominated performance, could have played the President to Burt Lancaster’s maniacal Army General out to pull a military coup and take control of the country? No one else at the time could have brought the authority he brings to the role in this tension filled Cold War classic in which he remains calm under mounting pressure while Lancaster and Kirk Douglas as the Colonel who blows the whistle on him chew up the scenery.

The film also stars Ava Gardner as a fading beauty; Edmond O’Brien in an Oscar nominated performance as March’s most trusted ally and John Houseman in an uncredited appearance as an Admiral.

THE ICEMAN COMETH (1973), directed by John Frankenheimer

Eugene O’Neill’s titanic play is a meditation on the Last Supper with Lee Marvin’s salesman/iceman a John the Baptist figure; young Jeff Bridges a Judas figure; the great Robert Ryan, who deserved at least a posthumous Oscar nomination for his towering performance, a self-loathing St. Peter.

Marvin struck everyone at the time as miscast in a role that Jason Robards all but owned, but in retrospect he is perfectly fine, as is the entire cast including March who had his last screen role as the doddering old bar-keep who ventures outside for the first time since his wife died twenty years earlier.

The film was part of producer Ely Landau’s American Film Theatre in which classic plays would be presented, one per month, for only two days in select theatres. The film’s limited run kept Ryan, who had won numerous critics’ awards posthumously, as well as March from prospective Oscar nods.

FREDRIC MARCH AND OSCAR

  • The Royal Family of Broadway (1930/31) – nominated Best Actor
  • Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931/32) – Oscar – Best Actor
  • A Star Is Born (1937) – nominated Best Actor
  • The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) – Oscar – Best Actor
  • Death of a Salesman (1951) – nominated Best Actor

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