He was born
Stanislaus Pascal Franchot Tone in
Niagara Falls, New York, the youngest son of Dr. Frank Jerome Tone, the president of the Carborundum Company, and his wife, Gertrude Franchot. He was of
French Canadian, Irish, English and
Basque ancestry,
http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=:a39875&id=I01907http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=haruspex&id=I071226 and was related to Irish revolutionary
Theobald Wolfe Tone.
Tone attended
Cornell University where he was President of the Dramatic Club and was elected to the
Sphinx Head Society. He gave up the family business to pursue an acting career in the theatre. After graduating he moved to
Greenwich Village, New York, and got his first
Broadway role in the
1929 Katharine Cornell production of
The Age of Innocence.
The following year he joined
The Theatre Guild and played Curly in their production of
Green Grow the Lilacs. (later to become the famous musical
Oklahoma!) He later became a founding member of the famed
Group Theatre, together with
Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Clifford Odets, and others, many of whom had worked with
The Theatre Guild. (Lee Strasberg had been a castmate of Tone's in
Green Grow the Lilacs.) These were intense and productive years for him: among the productions of the Group he acted in (
1931), 1931 (1931) and
Success Story (
1932). Franchot Tone was universally regarded by the critics as one of the most promising actors of his generation.
Gary Cooper called Tone the best actor he had ever worked with.
The same year, however, Tone was the first of the Group to turn his back to the theatre and go to
Hollywood when
MGM offered him a film contract; nevertheless he always considered cinema far inferior to the theatre and recalled his stage years with longing. He often sent financial support to the Group Theatre which often in needed it (he eventually came back from time to time to the stage after the 1940s). His screen debut was in the 1932 movie
The Wiser Sex. He achieved fame in
1933, when he made seven movies in a single year, including
Today We Live, written by
William Faulkner, where he first met his future wife
Joan Crawford, Bombshell, with
Jean Harlow (with whom he co-starred in three other movies), and the smash hit
Dancing Lady, again with Crawford and
Clark Gable. In
1935, probably his luckiest year, he starred in
Mutiny on the Bounty (for which he was nominated for the
Academy Award for Best Actor), The Lives of a Bengal Lancer and
Dangerous opposite
Bette Davis, with whom he was rumoured to have had an affair.
He was married
October 11, 1935 in
New Jersey to actress
Joan Crawford; they were divorced in
1939. They made seven films together:
Today We Live (1933),
Dancing Lady (1933),
Sadie McKee (1934),
No More Ladies (1935),
The Gorgeous Hussy (1936),
Love On The Run (1936) and
The Bride Wore Red (1937).
He married and divorced three more times: to fashion model turned actress
Jean Wallace (1941–48, two sons; she next married
Cornel Wilde), actress
Barbara Payton (1951–52) (which resulted in his being physically assaulted by Payton's one-time lover,
Tom Neal), and finally to the much younger actress Dolores Dorn (1956–59).
He worked steadily through the
1940s without breaking through as a major star: he was beginning to be type-cast as the wealthy cafe-society playboy and very few of the films of this period are notable. One conspicuous exception was
Five Graves to Cairo (
1943), the third film by the young
Billy Wilder, a brilliant war- and spy-story, starring Tone,
Akim Tamiroff and
Erich von Stroheim as German
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.
In the
1950s he moved to
television and returned to
Broadway, where he had begun his career. He co-starred in the
Ben Casey medical series from
1965 to
1966 as Casey's supervisor. He also starred in, directed and produced his first film, the adaptation of
Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (
1957) with then wife Dolores Dorn.
A chain-smoker, he died of
lung cancer in
New York City at the age of 63. Joan Crawford was moved by Tone's plight during his illness and was reported to have taken him into her home to care for him. According to a visitor who asked who the man in the wheelchair was, Crawford replied: "Him? That's Franchot". His remains were
cremated and his ashes were scattered.
Franchot Tone has a star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6558 Hollywood Blvd.
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