Stanislaus Pascal Franchot Tone (February 27, 1905 – September 18, 1968) was an American actor, producer, and director of stage, film and television. He was a leading man in the 1930s and early 1940s, and at the height of his career was known for his gentlemanly sophisticate roles, with supporting roles by the 1950s. His acting crossed many genres including pre-Code romantic leads to noir layered roles and World War I films. He appeared as a guest star in episodes of several golden age television series, including The Twilight Zone and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour while continuing to act and produce in the theater and movies throughout the 1960s.
Tone was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as Midshipman Roger Byam in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), along with his co-stars Clark Gable and Charles Laughton, making it the only film to have three simultaneous Best Actor nominations, and leading to the creation of the Best Supporting Actor category.
For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Tone received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Placed February 8, 1960, it is located at 6558 Hollywood Boulevard.
Stanislaus Pascal Franchot Tone was born in Niagara Falls, New York, the youngest son of Dr. Frank Jerome Tone, the wealthy president of the
Carborundum Company, and his socially prominent wife, Gertrude Van Vrancken Franchot. Tone was also a distant relative of Wolfe Tone (the "father of Irish Republicanism"). Tone was of French Canadian, Irish, Dutch and English ancestry. Through his ancestor, the nobleman Gilbert L'Homme de Basque, translated to Basque Homme and finally Bascom, he was of French Basque descent.
Tone was educated at The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, from which he was dismissed and Niagara Falls High School. He entered Cornell University, where he was president of the drama club, acting in productions of Shakespeare. He was also elected to the Sphinx Head Society and joined the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity. After graduating in 1927, he gave up the family business to pursue an acting career, moving to Greenwich Village, New York.
Tone was in The Belt (1927), Centuries (1927–28), The International (1928), and a popular adaptation of The Age of Innocence (1928–29) with Katherine Cornell. He followed it with appearances in Uncle Vanya (1929), Cross Roads (1929), Red Rust (1929–30), Hotel Universe (1930), and Pagan Lady (1930–31).
He joined the Theatre Guild and played Curly in their production of Green Grow the Lilacs (1931), where Tone sang, which later became the basis for the musical Oklahoma! Robert Benchley of The New Yorker said that "Tone made lyrical love to [co-star] Walker" between the Sammy Lee chorus routines of the play. The Lynn Riggs play received mixed reviews, mostly favorable, and was a popular success lasting 64 performances on Broadway. Tone joined the Group Theatre along with other former Theatre Guild members Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Clifford Odets. Clifford Odets recalled of Tone's acting, "The two most talented young actors I have known in the American theater in my time have been Franchot Tone and Marlon Brando, and I think Franchot was the more talented." Strasberg, who was a director in the Group during 1931–1941 and then teacher of "The Method" in the 1950s, 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 were 1931 (1931) lasting 12 performances, Maxwell Anderson's Night Over Taos (1932) a play in verse that lasted 10, The House of Connelly (1931) lasting 91 performances and John Howard Lawson's Success Story (1932) directed by Lee Strasberg. Outside of Group productions, he was in A Thousand Summers (1932).
Tone made his film debut with The Wiser Sex (1932) starring Claudette Colbert, filmed by Paramount at their Astoria Studios.
Tone was the first of the Group to go to Hollywood when MGM offered him a film contract. In his memoir on the Group Theater, The Fervent Years, Harold Clurman recalls Tone being the most confrontational and egocentric of the group, a "strikingly individualistic personality." Burgess Meredith credits Tone with informing him of the existence of "the Method" and what was soon to be the Actors Studio under Strasberg's teachings. Tone himself considered cinema far more invasive to private life and paced differently from theater productions. He recalled his stage years with fondness, financially supporting the Group Theater in its declining years.
MGM immediately gave Tone a series of impressive roles, casting him in six pre-Code film standards, starting in 1933 with a support role in the romantic WWI drama Today We Live, written by William Faulkner in collaboration with director Howard Hawks. The script was first conceived as a WWI buddy film, but the studio executives wanted a vehicle for their popular leading lady Joan Crawford, forcing Faulkner and Hawks to work in the romance between co-stars Gary Cooper and Crawford. Tone was then the romantic male lead in Gabriel Over the White House starring Walter Huston, followed by a lead role with Loretta Young in Midnight Mary.
Tone romanced Miriam Hopkins in King Vidor's The Stranger's Return and was the male lead in Stage Mother. He also had a role in Bombshell, with Jean Harlow and Lee Tracy. The last of the sequence of films was Dancing Lady, with an on-screen love triangle with his future wife Joan Crawford and Clark Gable, which was a "lavishly staged spectacle" with a solid performance by Tone.
Twentieth Century Pictures borrowed Tone to romance Constance Bennett in Moulin Rouge (1934) as she played dual roles in which "she shines as a comedienne" and his performance was called "equally clever in a role that calls for a serious mein" by The New York Times. Back at MGM, he was again co-starring with Crawford in Sadie McKee (1934), then was borrowed by Fox to co-star "commendably" with Madeleine Carroll in John Ford's French Foreign Legion picture, The World Moves On (1934).
After The Girl from Missouri (1934) with Harlow, MGM finally gave Tone top billing in Straight Is the Way (1934), although it was considered a "B" film, one which didn't have a high publicity or production cost. Warner Bros. then borrowed him for Gentlemen Are Born (1934).
At Paramount, Tone co-starred in the Academy Award nominated hit movie, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935) with Gary Cooper. He was top billed in One New York Night (1935) but billed underneath Harlow and William Powell in Reckless (1935). He supported Crawford and Robert Montgomery in No More Ladies (1935) and had another box-office success with Mutiny on the Bounty, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor, along with co-stars Clark Gable and Charles Laughton.
Warner Bros. borrowed him again, this time to play Bette Davis' leading man in Dangerous (1935). After a lead role in Exclusive Story (1935), he was again paired with friend Loretta Young in The Unguarded Hour (1936), and also starred with Grace Moore in Columbia's The King Steps Out (1936), notable for the debut of an eleven-year-old Gwen Verdon.
Tone and Harlow co-starred again in Suzy (1936) with then up and comer Cary Grant, who was billed third. The film was popular with audiences, but reviews were less than kind with The New York Times negatively comparing it to other recent WWI movies calling it "balderdash", but thanked "Mr. Tone for the few honest moments of drama that the film possesses. His young Irishman is about the only convincing and natural character in the piece." He then filmed The Gorgeous Hussy (1936) with Crawford, Robert Taylor and Lionel Barrymore with co-star Beulah Bondi earning an Academy Award nomination for the Andrew Jackson period piece. A Crawford and Gable film capitalizing on It Happened One Night by casting the pair in roles as fast talking journalists in Love on the Run (1936), found Tone in a supporting role.