Every month we throw the spotlight on an actor or actress who exemplifies what it means to be a class act. We welcome your emails if you have a suggestion for a future Star of the Month. The Midnight Palace is pleased to present the Star of the Month for January 2010: Franchot Tone.

Date of Birth
February 27, 1905, Niagara Falls, New York

Date of Death
September 18, 1968, New York, New York

Birth Name
Stanislas Pascal Franchot Tone

Nickname(s)
N/A

Height
6' 0"

Overview:

Franchot Tone once expressed to a reporter that, in his view, the theatre enlightened audiences and movies entertained them. It was a philosophy he stood by over the course of five decades as an actor in both mediums, as well as on radio and television, sometimes blending the two initiatives together when he found the right projects as his career progressed.

Right from the start, Franchot was, as he put it, a born show-off who loved to imitate Charlie Chaplin for the neighborhood kids and generally entertain anyone who would watch him. He made his debut into the world on a cold winter day in Niagara Falls, New York, in 1905, the second of two sons born to Dr. Frank J. Tone, a self-made noted biochemical engineer, and his wife, Gertrude Franchot Tone, a women?s rights activist who came from an affluent political family.

Young Franchot was highly-spirited and whip-smart, which was a blessing and a curse in his early years in school. Classmates at the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, remembered him as having an enviable photographic memory, regularly completing his studies quicker than anyone else. He was also the go-to guy on campus, a loyal, approachable friend who they could turn to for advice on everything from social etiquette to girls.

Requiring less study time than his classmates, Franchot often found himself in trouble with school authorities when caught spending his idle time sneaking off to town for entertainment. A concerned professor suggested that he might like to investigate dramatics as a new hobby, hoping it might harness Franchot?s outgoing personality, keen memory and seemingly unlimited energy.

While the introduction to acting helped Franchot somewhat to focus, it was too little too late and he was dismissed from Hill in his senior year for being, as the headmaster wrote in a letter to his parents, ?a subtle influence for disorder? among the student body.

Completing his studies at home, Franchot next enrolled at Cornell University where he majored in Romance Languages with the goal of becoming a teacher. He also joined the Dramatics Club where he performed in quarterly productions, directed a few plays and lead the group as its president his senior year.

At a crossroads upon graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1927, Franchot followed his heart and natural instincts, and chose acting as his profession with the moral support of his family. Often noted as coming from wealth, Franchot told a reporter that while his family would never let him starve, and would help with introductions through family connections, it was up to him to make his place it in the world.

After spending the summer acting and performing behind-the-scenes duties with a Buffalo, New York, stock company that his uncle was acquainted with, Franchot moved to New York City and joined the New Playwright Theatre in Greenwich Village for three productions before making his Broadway debut in November 1928 in The Age of Innocence starring the legendary Katharine Cornell.

He found steady work and earned positive reviews with the Theatre Guild over the next few years, appearing in ten productions including Green Grow The Lilacs in 1931, which would later become the musical Oklahoma, in which he starred as Curly. During this production he met Lee Strasberg, who invited him to come to a formation meeting of a radical new acting group he was co-founding, The Group Theatre.

With the Group Theatre, Franchot found a new challenge apart from what was becoming routine drawing room plays in productions that had social messages and that incorporated sense memory acting techniques pioneered by Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavsky, administrator of the Moscow Art Theatre. In 1931 they debuted House of Connelly and Franchot performed in five productions with the troupe during their first season. While he took practicing the new techniques seriously, long periods of focused group study time was again not his forte.

By 1932, Franchot had become increasingly interested in filmmaking at a time when studios were interested in theatrical talent with great voices for talkies. Franchot?s velvet voice and stage presence won him a featured role in Paramount?s The Wiser Sex starring Claudette Colbert and Melvyn Douglas. He shots scenes in Astoria while remaining active with the Group. Paramount passed on signing him full time, but he caught the interest of MGM and after a successful screen test in New York, MGM brought him to Hollywood in late 1932 under a seven-year contract.

As MGM?s publicity machine began pumping Franchot as the next Clark Gable, production wasn?t quite sure what to do with him. Franchot became frustrated early on waiting for roles to be assigned and was anxious to learn acting for the camera. While the fan magazine writers wanted to talk to him about a rumored romance with Joan Crawford, his co-star in his first MGM film, Today We Live in 1933, Franchot kept trying to turn the conversation toward his craft, with mixed results which began a long-standing love-hate relationship with the press.

A string of featured and co-starring roles alongside MGM leading ladies including Crawford, Jean Harlow, Miriam Hopkins and Loretta Young followed, and he was loaned out for more work to Columbia, First National and Paramount At Paramount he found his meatiest role to date, in the adventure film Lives of a Bengal Lancer, with Gary Cooper in 1934.

Inspired by the success of his performance in Bengal Lancer, MGM cast him in the 1935 mega budget Mutiny on the Bounty as Midshipman Roger Byam when Robert Montgomery refused the role. Despite it not being a starring role, Franchot earned a Best Actor Academy Award nomination along with his co-stars Charles Laughton and Clark Gable. Victor McLaglen won the statue for his performance in The Informer, but Franchot?s unusual nomination situation served another pivotal purpose, as the driving force behind the Academy?s creation of the Best Supporting Actor and Actress categories the following year.

After filming Mutiny on the Bounty, in 1935, Franchot was loaned to Warner Bros. to star alongside Bette Davis in Dangerous, an aptly-titled film to describe the off-screen drama that brewed with his real life love interest, Joan Crawford, who had a personal and professional rivalry with Davis. After two years of turning down Franchot?s marriage proposals, Crawford accepted and they were wed in October of that year amid a torrent of newspaper headlines.

The Tone-Crawford marriage often eclipsed the work they were doing on screen. Crawford?s intensity for being a movie star in every sense of the word from work ethics to fan appreciation was the opposite of Franchot?s desire to simply practice his craft as a working actor and enjoy life out of the spotlight. By 1939 their marriage was over, although they remained lifelong friends.

At the same time, Franchot?s contract with MGM was expiring. He had planned to work exclusively with producer Irving Thalberg, who seemed to be the only executive who understood how to best use Franchot?s talents, but Thalberg?s death in 1936 put an end to that. When Louis B. Mayer offered Franchot a new contract with a plan to develop him as an all-around character actor, Franchot declined. Once again, he followed his heart and instincts and returned to Broadway theatre, appearing in the very successful Group Theatre production of The Gentle People with Sylvia Sidney.

Franchot returned to Hollywood in late 1940 on his own terms. No longer satisfied with someone else dictating his career, he signed independent deals with Universal, Columbia and Paramount to do films of his own choosing. He sought out unlikely roles that did not fit his ?wealthy playboy? stereotype, and during this decade he found success in a number of genres including the comedy western Trail of the Vigilantes (Universal, 1940), three musical comedies with Universal star Deanna Durbin, the adventure/war film Five Graves to Cairo with Ann Baxter and Erich Stroheim (Paramount, 1943), the noir thrillers Phantom Lady with Ella Raines (Universal, 1944) and Dark Waters with Merle Oberon (United Artists, 1944), the romantic comedy Her Husband?s Affairs with Lucille Ball (Columbia 1947) and Every Girl Should Be Married with Cary Grant and Betsy Drake (RKO, 1948). Take a look at this clip from Five Graves To Cairo:

The 1940s also found Franchot settling into family life when he married actress Jean Wallace soon after she turned 18, when he was twice her age, 36. Together they had two sons, Pascal and Thomas Jefferson and early on enjoyed a happy home life. As Jean matured and started becoming her own person, and with drinking involved on both their parts, the marriage began to unravel. By the time Franchot?s production of Man on the Eiffel Tower (RKO, 1949) was done filming in Paris, co-starring Charles Laughton and Burgess Meredith with Jean in a featured role, their marriage was also over.

Franchot?s life and public image took a one-two punch, quite literally, when he became involved with actress Barbara Payton in 1950. Franchot and Barbara?s turbulent on-and-off-again relationship, as well as his custody battles with ex-wife Jean Wallace and her new husband, actor Cornel Wilde, provided ample material for the gossip columns. Franchot was seen in the headlines more than on-screen.

Exit Stage Left...

In late 1951, things came to a head between Franchot, Barbara and the other man in her life, actor and former boxer, Tom Neal. In a chivalrous move, Franchot challenged Tom to a fight for the affections of Barbara, and lost. After spending considerable time in the hospital, Franchot and Barbara married in her hometown of Cloquet, Minnesota. The rocky union played out almost daily in the press, and lasted a mere 53 days.

While Tom and Barbara?s careers dissolved, Franchot returned his focus to theatre, with successes in Oh, Men! Oh, Women! with Betsy von Furstenberg (to whom he was briefly engaged) and Gig Young in 1953, and Eugene O?Neill?s Moon For The Misbegotten in 1957 with Wendy Hiller and Cyril Cusack. Additionally the new medium of television also provided ample roles in weekly dramatic anthologies and guest starring roles that kept him busy on a monthly basis for over a decade. In television he found an outlet where he could explore darker, more complex characters in anthology productions, most notably The Twilight Zone, as well as guest-starring parts on series like Bonanza, Wagon Train, and Run For Your Life. He especially enjoyed putting on make up to portray stories of famous citizens such as Mark Twain and Charles Steinmetz.

His final marriage, to actress Dolores Dorn from 1956-1959, coincided with his most ambitious independent project, Uncle Vanya, which was produced Off-Broadway and also filmed with the same cast for theatrical release in 1958. Their divorce was amicable and they also remained friends. Health issues in the 1960s did not stop Franchot from working. Before his death in 1968 from lung cancer, he turned in memorable performances including the most notable roles in two Otto Preminger productions, Advise & Consent (1962) and In Harm?s Way (1965).

His funeral was held at Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home in Manhattan and his longtime friend, Burgess Meredith gave the eulogy. Despite persistent rumors that Franchot?s ex-wife, Joan Crawford, took him in and cared for him at the end of his life, he in fact lived in his own Manhattan home a few blocks away from her and was cared for by his sons. He was cremated and returned to his family.

Special Links of Interest:
Franchot Tone on IMDB
Film Review: Sadie McKee
Franchot Tone: Urbane Rebel
Q&A with Franchot Tone Biographer Lisa Burks at Alt Film Guide

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