Fredric March

Fredric March: The Actor Who Vanished Into Every Role

In February 1959, an actor stood before a joint session of Congress and read the Gettysburg Address to mark Lincoln's 150th birthday — an assignment given not to a statesman or a historian but to Fredric March, the man Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz would later rank, alongside Spencer Tracy, "in a tier above the rest" of Hollywood's golden age. That March could be trusted with Lincoln's words on the floor of Congress says something about the reputation he built over five decades: not stardom in the conventional Hollywood sense, but a level of craft serious enough to be treated as civic property.

From Banking to Broadway

He was born Ernest Frederick McIntyre Bickel on August 31, 1897, in Racine, Wisconsin, to Cora Brown Marcher, an English-born schoolteacher, and John F. Bickel, a Presbyterian elder in the wholesale hardware trade. He attended Winslow Elementary and Racine High School before enrolling at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he joined the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, and he served as a U.S. Army artillery lieutenant during the First World War. His original plan was banking, not acting — a path he abandoned only after an emergency appendectomy forced a reconsideration of his direction. He began working as a film extra in New York in 1920, adopting a shortened version of his mother's maiden name, and made his Broadway debut in 1926, at age twenty-nine, in *The Melody Man*. A Paramount Pictures contract followed by decade's end, and March made seven pictures in 1929 alone, a workload typical of the studio system he would later be praised for standing somewhat apart from.

Two Academy Awards, Two Decades Apart

March's screen breakthrough came with *Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde* (1931), a dual performance — refined physician and predatory monster — sustained largely through his own physical transformation rather than makeup effects alone, and it won him the Academy Award for Best Actor, tied that year with Wallace Beery. Fifteen years later he won a second Best Actor Oscar for *The Best Years of Our Lives* (1946), playing a returning World War II veteran adjusting to a changed marriage and a changed country — a performance built on restraint rather than transformation, evidence of a range wide enough to anchor both a horror melodrama and a sober postwar drama. Between those two wins came Oscar nominations for *The Royal Family of Broadway* (1930), *A Star Is Born* (1937), and, later, *Death of a Salesman* (1951), alongside major roles in *Design for Living* (1933), *Anna Karenina* (1935), *Les Misérables* (1935), and *Anthony Adverse* (1936).

An Equal Career on Stage

Unlike most film stars of his era, March maintained a stage career of comparable weight, winning Tony Awards for Best Actor in a Play twice — for *Years Ago* (1947) and for the original Broadway production of Eugene O'Neill's *Long Day's Journey Into Night* (1956) — putting him, alongside Helen Hayes, among the very few performers to win both the Academy Award and the Tony Award twice each. He continued taking demanding stage and screen roles into his sixties and seventies, including *Inherit the Wind* (1960), *Seven Days in May* (1964), and *The Iceman Cometh* (1973), and his film and stage honors extended further still: a Golden Globe, two Venice Film Festival Volpi Cups, a Berlin Silver Bear, three BAFTA nominations, and three Emmy nominations.

Marriage and Partnership

March's first marriage, to Ellis Baker in 1924, ended in divorce after he met actress Florence Eldridge; the two married in 1927 and remained together until his death, appearing in seven films together, including *Inherit the Wind*, and adopting two children. The couple commissioned architect Wallace Neff to design their Bel Air home in 1934, a house later owned by Wallis Annenberg and, subsequently, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston.

Political Life

March was a lifelong Democrat and a co-founder, in July 1936, of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League alongside Dorothy Parker, Donald Ogden Stewart, Fritz Lang, and Oscar Hammerstein II. That activism drew scrutiny from the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1938 and 1940, and in 1948 he successfully sued the anti-communist publication *Counterattack* for defamation, settling out of court for $250,000. He remained a civil rights advocate for five decades, working closely with the NAACP, and in 1959 delivered the Gettysburg Address before Congress for the Lincoln sesquicentennial — a rare instance of an actor being handed that kind of ceremonial trust.

A Later Controversy, Clarified

In 1919–20, March briefly belonged to a University of Wisconsin student social group that called itself the "Ku Klux Klan," a name unconnected to the national organization and renamed by the group itself in 1922 once the actual Klan became better known nationally. Decades later, in 2018 and 2020, social media confusion over that youthful, differently-named campus club led two university theater venues bearing his name — at UW–Madison and UW–Oshkosh — to be renamed, though later clarification of the historical facts prompted discussion of reinstating his name.

Why Fredric Is Called a Genius

The claim for genius here rests on a documented, unusually wide range rather than a single signature style, and the sources support it more directly than they do for many actors of his generation. Critic John Baxter credited March with a "special ability to suggest genuine mental pain" combined with "complete physical control" and a face that suggested "both intelligence and sensitivity" — a description of an actor capable of precise internal work, not just presence. His body of work backs that assessment concretely: a monstrous physical transformation in *Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde*, restrained postwar grief in *The Best Years of Our Lives*, and Willy Loman's collapse in *Death of a Salesman*, spread across both stage and screen at the highest level of recognition available in each medium. The honest complication is that March never achieved the instant, iconic recognizability of contemporaries like Humphrey Bogart or Cary Grant — as the Boston Globe's Joan Wickersham observed, he built "a brilliant stage and film career" partly by keeping a distance from the studio star system that manufactured that kind of fame. What the record shows, then, is not a flashy singular genius but a rare case of a Hollywood-era actor whose technical range across radically different roles and mediums genuinely earns the comparison to the era's most serious dramatic talents.

Legacy

March died of prostate cancer on April 14, 1975, in Los Angeles, at age 77, having undergone surgery for the disease five years earlier; he was buried at his family's estate in New Milford, Connecticut. He co-hosted the 26th Academy Awards ceremony in 1954 and left behind a Hollywood Walk of Fame star at 1620 Vine Street, but his more durable legacy is the dual-medium career itself — a body of work spanning silent-era extra work to 1970s stage tragedy that remains one of the most sustained demonstrations of range in American acting history.

Achievements

• Academy Award for Best Actor — 1947
• Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play — 1957
• Educated at University of Wisconsin–Madison and Washington Park High School
• Worked as actor, character actor and stage actor