Fredric March was an Academy Award winning American actor.He was born in Racine, Wisconsin, and began working life as a banker, but an emergency appendectomy caused him to re-evaluate his life, and in 1920 he began to be cast as an extra in movies made in New York.
He appeared on Broadway in 1926, and won an Oscar nomination in 1930 for The Royal Family of Broadway, in which he played a role based upon John Barrymore.
March won an Oscar in 1932 for Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, and again in 1946 for The Best Years of Our Lives. He was one of the few actors to resist the studios, and was able to 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.
Perhaps his greatest late-in-life role was in Inherit the Wind in 1960, opposite Spencer Tracy.
Yet today, Fredric March is one of the most forgotten of all the Hollywood giants. Perhaps this is because, unlike his contemporaries Tracy, Gable and Cooper, March never sought to project his own personality on-screen. Instead, he endeavored to create a new characterization for each role, to become the individual he was portraying- so that an audience never knew where the person “Fredric March” ended, and the characters “Mr Hyde“, “Norman Maine” or “Mark Twain” began.
He was married to the actress Florence Eldridge from 1927 until his death in 1975, was a supporter of liberal
political causes, and was a steady supporter of the Democratic Party. He died in Los Angeles, California.