Actors concerned with their looks rarely find their careers lasting past the last blush of youth. Fredric March came to Hollywood with classic good looks, but in his bones he was a character actor. He even said, "Stardom is just an uneasy seat on top of a tricky toboggan. Being a star is merely perching at the head of the downgrade. A competent player can last a lifetime. A star, a year or two." With that attitude, he kept his career going for 50 years and secured a reputation as one of America's most accomplished actors.

Acting was hardly in the genes of young Ernest Frederick McIntyre Bickel when he was born on August 31, 1897 to a conservative hardware teacher and his schoolteacher wife in Racine, WI. Although the young man had a talent for mimicry, he gave up his dreams of acting to pursue a safe career in banking. Then an emergency appendectomy convinced him life was too short not to do what he loved, and he chucked it all for the stage. In his first year, he landed extra roles in silent films shot in the New York area and before long he was appearing on Broadway. The lead in the touring company of George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber's The Royal Family, a comedy based on the Barrymore family, took him to Los Angeles, where the handsome young man signed with Paramount Pictures.

By that point, he was already married. A brief marriage to Ellis Baker in 1925 ended in two years and drew little comment from March in later life. In 1927, however, he wed actress Florence Eldridge with whom he would share one of show business' longest marriages. They would work together frequently on stage, screen and television.

At first, March was typecast in comic roles, making his Paramount debut as Ruth Chatterton's husband in The Dummy (1929), a crime spoof about an estranged society couple brought back together by their daughter's kidnapping. He followed it by partnering with Clara Bow in her talking film debut in The Wild Party, facing the first challenges of married life with Ann Harding in Paris Bound (both 1929), and helping director Harry d'Arrast and co-star Nancy Carroll invent the screwball comedy in Laughter (1930). His few dramatic roles were in support of long-suffering leading ladies like Chatterton in the soap opera Sarah and Son (1930). At least he got to bring his John Barrymore imitation to the screen in The Royal Family of Broadway (1930), which brought him his first Oscar® nomination.

March's Hollywood career might have fizzled had director Rouben Mamoulian not realized his potential and fought to cast him in his adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). The performance was a revelation as March threw himself into both the well-intentioned doctor's emotional torment and the brutish monster's sadism. He won the Oscar® and established his credibility as a serious actor. March also learned a valuable lesson about the shortsightedness of studio executives. When his Paramount contract ran out in 1934, he refused to sign with another studio, becoming one of Hollywood's first free-lance film stars.

Until then, March was considered a top property at Paramount, important enough to join such top names as Maurice Chevalier and Claudette Colbert playing himself in Make Me a Star (1932), the studio's remake of Merton of the Movies. They also put him in their top literary properties, including Design for Living (1933) and Death Takes a Holiday (1934). Going freelance hardly hurt March, as other studios snapped him up for prestige productions. He played Robert Browning to Norma Shearer's Elizabeth Barrett in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) at MGM, then returned to play Vronsky to Greta Garbo's Anna Karenina (1935). And David O. Selznick signed him for back to back projects directed by William A. Wellman in 1937, the screwball comedy Nothing Sacred, co-starring Carole Lombard, and the original A Star Is Born, which brought him an Oscar® nomination for playing fading star Norman Maine. By 1938, March was one of the highest-paid men in America.

But that wasn't enough for him. Even as the studios were clamoring for his services, he and Eldridge decided to return to Broadway. Their initial vehicle, Yr Obedient Husband, was so badly reviewed that the next day the married co-stars took out an ad in the New York papers featuring a cartoon of a trapeze artist missing his partner and saying, "Oops! Sorry!" They made up for it with later hits like Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, Ruth Gordon's Over 21 and Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night.

Returning to Broadway cut down on the quantity of March's film appearances but hardly on their quality. He was memorable as both a devoted minister in One Foot in Heaven (1941) and a politician married to supernatural charmer Veronica Lake in I Married a Witch (1942). After two years of stage work, he came back with a bang as the returning veteran in William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), winning his second Oscar® for the prestigious production. By that time Hollywood was changing. Rumors that the staunch Democrat was a Communist almost cost him the role. A few years later, when he and Eldridge were named as "fellow travelers" in the Red-baiting magazine Counter-Attack, they sued for libel and won.

By the '50s, March began moving into character roles, something that hardly bothered him as long as the roles were good. After making the mistake of turning down Death of a Salesman on Broadway, he jumped at the chance to bring Willy Loman to the screen in 1951 and won his fifth Oscar® nomination. When Spencer Tracy left The Desperate Hours (1955) over a billing dispute, March gladly took second billing to Humphrey Bogart and, in many opinions, stole the picture from him. He would finally co-star with Tracy, sharing a memorable courtroom confrontation in 1960's Inherit the Wind, which marked the last time Eldridge and he would share the screen.

Like many aging stars, March trafficked in gravitas in his senior years, whether as Gregory Peck's boss in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), a crotchety lab boss in The Young Doctors (1961) or the beleaguered U.S. president in Seven Days in May (1964). But failing health posed a new challenge. In 1970, surgery for prostate cancer left March wondering if he would ever act again. Fortunately, he got one last great role, as the optimistic bar owner Harry Hope in the film version of O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh (1973). He passed away two months later.

by Frank Miller