Franchot Tone

Born Stanislas Pascal Franchot Tone in Niagara Falls, New York, into wealth, the son of an industrialist who ran a major chemical corporation, he was the improbable blue blood of the American avant-garde theater. Educated at Cornell, where he presided over the dramatic club, he committed himself to the stage and became a founding member of the fiercely idealistic, politically engaged Group Theatre, the crucible of modern American acting.

Hollywood lured him away, and MGM, seeing his polish and easy elegance, cast him as the well-bred gentleman, the sophisticated rival, the man in evening clothes. He was excellent as the conflicted midshipman Roger Byam in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), a role that earned him an Academy Award nomination, and he partnered many of the studio's great leading ladies with urbane charm.

Yet Tone remained ambivalent about his stardom, always suspecting that the machine had smoothed away the serious artist he had trained to be. His much-publicized marriage to Joan Crawford, and their eventual divorce, kept him in the gossip columns in ways that sat uneasily with his theatrical ambitions. He drifted between films, Broadway, and later live television, never quite reconciling the two halves of himself.

His later life was turbulent, marked by four marriages, heavy drinking, and a notorious 1951 brawl over an actress that left him badly beaten. But he never stopped seeking worthwhile work, producing and starring in a screen version of Uncle Vanya and turning in a fine late performance as the dying president in Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent (1962). Lung cancer took him in 1968, at sixty-two. He remains a poignant figure: the gifted man of the theater whom the movies made comfortable and never quite fulfilled.