Spencer Tracy

Class of 1924: Star of Hollywood’s Golden Age

One of the mostly widely respected movie actors of all time first walked the boards at Ripon College.

Spencer Bonaventure Tracy was a theatrical and Academy Award-winning film actor. He appeared in 75 feature films and numerous short films from 1930 to 1967 and received two Academy Awards for Best Actor and nine Academy Award nominations.

He was born April 5, 1900, in Milwaukee and came to Ripon College to study medicine. He attended from February 1921 through April 1922, appearing in several plays. He decided to make acting his career. While touring the Northeast with the Ripon debate team, he auditioned for and was accepted to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York.

But he never forgot Ripon. “I owe whatever success I had to the start I got at Ripon College,” he said, upon receiving an honorary degree from Ripon in 1940. “… I shall always be grateful. “ And to the graduating class, he added, “Please bear with me because when you come back, you’ll feel this, too. … God bless you all and give you strength to carry on.”

Of his years at Ripon, Tracy is quoted as saying, “I must have been a real pain in the *** —
arguing all the time with everybody — because one of the professors there sucked me into being on the debating team.”

He did, however, credit that professor, Henry Phillip Boody of the Speech and Dramatics department, with setting his foundation as an actor. “His name belongs in this story because it was he who set me on the trail which was to lead to Hollywood,” Tracy said.

“‘I want you to join debate,’ he told me one day. ‘Me?’ said I ungrammatically. ‘Yes, I think you’d make a good debater,’ went on the professor. ‘You like to argue about other things; let’s see how you can argue from a platform.’”

The 1935 Crimson stated: “Mr. Boody saw in Tracy the makings of an actor. He could learn the lines of a play so speedily that his friends marveled and Mr. Boody thought, surely, here was a prodigy. It took only one or two college plays until ‘Spence’ was cast in the most important roles of campus productions. According to Mr. Boody, the two plays in which Tracy was particularly outstanding were the one-act play ‘The Valiant’ and the three-act play ‘The Truth.’”

Boody’s daughter, Betty Boody Blodgett, Class of 1939, once told the Ripon Commonwealth Press that her father often talked about Tracy’s first short speech. Speaking extemporaneously for two minutes, Tracy told an emotional story about the tragic death of his sister and brought his listeners nearly to sobs. Seeing the effect he had had on his classmates and receiving the condolences of his professor, he had to admit that he didn’t really have a sister.

After appearing on stage in New York and in traveling shows, Tracy went to Hollywood. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor nine times, receiving it twice: for “Captains Courageous” in 1937 and for “Boys’ Town” in 1938.

Other major films included “San Francisco,” “Father of the Bride,” “Bad Day at Black Rock,” “The Old Man and the Sea,” “Inherit the Wind” and “Judgment at Nuremberg.”

He is widely considered as one of the best film actors of all time. He was ranked #64 in Empire (UK) magazine’s The Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time list in 1997; the 15th Greatest Movie Star of all time by Entertainment Weekly; ninth among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time by the American Film Institute in 1999 and 19th Greatest Movie Star of all time by Premiere Magazine.

His performance as Henry Drummond in “Inherit the Wind” (1960) was ranked #67 on Premiere Magazine’s 100 Greatest Performances of All Time.

He died June 10, 1967, at age 67, 17 days after completing his final film, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”

His great-grandson, Shane Tracy, is a member of the Class of 2017.