About Me
He was born Stanislas Pascal Franchot Tone on February 27,1905 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 had distant French Canadian, Irish and English ancestry, and was related to Irish poet Theobald Wolfe Tone.
President of the Dramatic Club at Cornell University, he gave up the family business to pursue 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 later became a founding member of the famed Group Theatre, together with Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Clifford Odets, and others. These were intense and productive years for him: among the productions of the Group can be mentioned Green Grow the Lilacs (later to become the famous musical Oklahoma!) (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.
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 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 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. According to a biography of his ex-wife Joan Crawford, he stayed with Crawford at her apartment and she tended to him despite her own final illness. 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.
Background by: Lynn Design
