Spencer Tracy Quotes

Spencer Tracy, when asked for advice on acting, said, “Know your lines and don’t bump into the furniture.” James Cagney said, “Walk in, plant your feet, look the other fellow in the eye and…tell the truth.” With all due respect to both of these giant talents, I would have to say there’s something more. The true creation of a being, a character other than one’s self, for me is comparable to a mystical or spiritual experience. To stand in another person’s shoes. To see as he sees, to hear as he hears. To know what he knows, and to do all this with a sense of control, a mastering of the dramatic moment, there must be more than a “natural talent” at work.

The single most important thing anyone needs to know about me," Kate hepburn said, "is that I am totally, completely the product of two damn fascinating individuals who happened to be my parents. I've had a pretty remarkable life, but compared to my mother and father, I'm dull.

Know your lines and don't bump into the furniture.

Just know your lines and don't bump into the furniture.

[On playing another character that was not Dr. Bob Hartley]: I think you're lucky when you realize what you are. Spencer Tracy always played Spencer Tracy. I'm not putting myself into that category, but, to the same extent, the part of me that was Bob Hartley is in my new character, Dick Loudin. If you make fine bone china and you're recognized as the best in the world, you don't suddenly announce you're going to make automobiles. We see it so much in this business. We're so self-destructive. If you really do something well, you should stick to it.

From the race’s conception, the press viewed it with skepticism. Sportswriters argued that the rich event was a farce arranged to pad Seabiscuit’s bankroll. Del Mar, conscious of the potential conflict of interest for the Howards and Smiths, barred public wagering on the race. But the press’s distrust and the absence of gambling did nothing to cool the enthusiasm of racing fans. On the sweltering race day, special trains and buses poured in from San Diego and Los Angeles, filling the track with well over twenty thousand people, many more than the track’s official capacity. Lin plastered a twenty-foot LIGAROTI sign on the wall behind the “I’m for Ligaroti” section, and scores of Crosby’s movie friends, including Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, Spencer Tracy and Ray Milland, took up their cerise and white pennants and filed in. “Is there anyone left in Hollywood?” wondered a spectator. Dave Butler led a chorus of Ligaroti cheers, and the crowd grew boisterous. Crosby perched on the roof with Oscar Otis, who would call the race for a national radio broadcast. In the jockeys’ room, Woolf suited up to man the helm on Seabiscuit while Richardson slipped on Ligaroti’s polka dots. Just before the race, Woolf and Richardson made a deal. No matter who won, they would “save,” or split, the purse between them.

Also, I was not in the business of capturing anyone into a marriage. I just did not want to marry anyone. I liked the idea of being my own self. Even when I was living with Spencer Tracy and he and I were together for twenty-seven years, we never really thought about or discussed marriage. He was married and I wasn't interested.

Remember your lines and don't bump into the furniture.

Acting is not the noblest profession in the world, but there are things lower than acting - not many, mind you, but politicians give you something to look down on from time to time.

I haven’t said it yet, but it seemed implied, that cinema for me was the American one, current Hollywood productions. “My” period goes roughly from The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (Henry Hathaway, 1935) with Gary Cooper and Mutiny on the Bounty (Frank Lloyd, 1935) with Charles Laughton and Clark Gable, to the death of Jean Harlow (which I relived many years later like the death of Marilyn Monroe, in an era more aware of the neurotic power of every symbol), with lots of comedies in between, the mystery-romances with Myrna Loy and William Powell and the dog Asta, the musicals of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the crime pictures of Chinese detective Charlie Chan and the horror films of Boris Karloff. I didn’t remember the names of the directors as well as the names of the actors, except for a few like Frank Capra, Gregory La Cava, and Frank Borzage, who represented the poor rather than the millionaires, usually with Spencer Tracy: they were the good-natured directors from the Roosevelt era; I learned this later; back then I consumed everything without distinguishing between them too much. American cinema in that moment consisted of a collection of actors’ faces without equal before or after (at least it seemed that way to me) and the adventures were simple mechanisms to get these faces together (sweethearts, character actors, extras) in different combinations.

The next bit is the fairy tale. There’s a day in April when it’s raining. The river is running fast. The girl whose father had died, whose mother raised her in the crooked house by the river, who grew up with that broken part inside where your father has died and which if you’re a girl and your father was Spencer Tracy you can’t fix or unhurt, that girl who yet found in herself some kind of forbearance and strength and was not bitter, whose name was Mary MacCarroll and who was beautiful without truly knowing it and had her mother and father’s dancing and pride in her, that girl walked the riverbank in the April rain. And standing at that place in Shaughnessy’s called Fisher’s Step, where the ground sort of raises a little and sticks out over the Shannon, right there, the place which in The Salmon in Ireland Abraham Swain says salmon pass daily and though it’s treacherous he calls a blessed little spot, right there, looking like a man who had been away a long time and had come back with what in Absalom, Absalom! (Book 1,666, Penguin Classics, London) William Faulkner calls diffident and tentative amazement, as if he’d been through some solitary furnace experience, and come out the other side, standing right there, suntanned face, pale-blue eyes that look like they are peering through smoke, lips pressed together, aged twenty-nine but looking older, back in Ireland less than two weeks, the ocean-motion still in his legs but strangely the river now lending him a river repose, standing right there, was Virgil Swain.

And my parents knew, because Barbara [Stanwyck] called their house a few times looking for me. I finally told them we were seeing each other, although I didn't give them all the details. They met her once, at a party at Clifton Webb's house, and my mother was upset that I was in love with an older woman. As for my father, as with most other events in my life, he was not in my corner. And I eventually told Spencer Tracy about it. All he said was, "Wonderful! Are you happy? If you're happy, that's all that matters.

We're coming to the end of the long, dark modern age. Slaughters of unnumbered human beings continue, but not among people who knew Spencer Tracy. Warfare persists, but the scale of battle is returning to something that the author of the Illiad would recognize. Maybe someday each combat casualty will rate the kind of mourning that Achilles did for Patroclus, except on television, and the saga of every Jessica Lynch will be an Odyssey or, anyway, a cover of People. There never will be peace, but we can have wars here, when we talk about our soldiers, we say, "Dey is only heros.

you're not only wrong, you're wrong at the top of your voice

Titled by year, Good News of 1939, 1940 became Maxwell House Coffee Time to begin the 1940–41 season, though the Good News title was still used for a few broadcasts. Maxwell House Coffee. CAST: Hosts: James Stewart, 1937; Robert Taylor, early to mid-1938; Robert Young, beginning in fall 1938; various hosts, 1939–40; Dick Powell, ca. 1940. Frank Morgan, resident comic. Fanny Brice as Baby Snooks beginning Dec. 23, 1937. Hanley Stafford as Daddy. Also many MGM film stars including Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, Mickey Rooney, Alice Faye, Spencer Tracy, Lionel Barrymore, Clark Gable,

She looked Spencer over, tip to toe, as though she were considering buying him. Then she smiled her friendliest smile and said, "You're rather short, aren't you?" "Don't worry honey," said Mankiewicz, trying desperately to extinguish Spencer's glare. "He'll cut you down to size.

I loved Spencer Tracy. He and his interests and his demands came first.

In The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson argues that Brennan should have won awards for even better performances in To Have and Have Not (1944), My Darling Clementine (1946), Red River (1948), The Far Country (1955), and Rio Bravo (1959). Thomson counts no less than twenty-eight high caliber Brennan performances in still more films, including These Three (1936), Fury (1936), Meet John Doe (1941), and Bad Day At Black Rock (1955). Brennan worked with Hollywood’s greatest directors—John Ford, Howard Hawks, William Wyler, King Vidor, and Fritz Lang—while also starring in Jean Renoir’s Hollywood directorial debut, Swamp Water (1941). To discuss Brennan’s greatest performances is also to comment on the work of Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Spencer Tracy, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Anne Baxter, Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, Linda Darnell, Ginger Rogers, Loretta Young, and many other stars.

Motion picture producers were well aware of audiences who now looked to Walter Brennan to spice up the action, to do something that would entertain them in pictures that were otherwise commonplace. Even in a major A film starring Spencer Tracy as the explorer Henry M. Stanley, Brennan was added for comic relief—in effect because he was Walter Brennan, screenwriter Philip Dunne recalled. When Brennan and Tracy, both Academy Award winners, appeared on the set of Stanley and Livingston, the huge assemblage of extras applauded both men.

Brennan’s best small role is in Fritz Lang’s Fury (May 29, 1936), another MGM production. Brennan plays “Bugs” Meyers, a deputy who locks up Joe Wilson (Spencer Tracy), falsely accused of murder, and is almost lynched. Brennan’s portrayal goes way beyond the scope of what is actually in the film’s script. He plays a new modern type, an ordinary man suddenly elevated to importance because he plays a small but highly visible part in a widely publicized crime story. In short scenes, Bugs’s ego expands as he becomes recognized as an “authority” on what happened. Brennan’s conception of the character is profoundly original. Bugs becomes a creation of publicity—and, suddenly, a figure of significance to himself—and his enjoyment of his new, expanded role, is palpable in the joy that suffuses Bugs’s face with the excitement of being—or rather acting like—he is in the know.

On the set, Walter provoked Spencer Tracy’s ire. Katie (Katharine Hepburn) didn’t have “good judgment” or common sense, Brennan told Tracy. Walter was referring to her attacks on Senator Joseph McCarthy. Tracy turned icy, and the next day director John Sturges discovered Tracy and Brennan were no longer speaking to one another. The estranged actors addressed one another through intermediaries. Sturges remembered this exchange: [Tracy to Sturges] Would you ask Mr. Brennan to not get in my key light? [Brennan to Sturges] Tell Mr. Tracy if he hit his mark, I wouldn’t be in his key light. At one point Brennan turned his back on Tracy and held up three fingers, signifying that he had three Academy Awards. Tracy had two.

Like Drums Across the River, Bad Day at Black Rock (January 7, 1955), is a revisionist work—this time examining the seamy side, the racism and thuggery—of postwar America. Brennan, looking much slimmer than in his previous pictures, plays a western town’s veterinarian and mortician. This taut drama, featuring menacing performances by a trio of villains (Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine, and Lee Marvin), ultimately centers on Brennan’s character (Doc Velle), who collaborates with John J. Macreedy (Spencer Tracy) to uncover the truth about Komoko, a Japanese American settler killed during the war. Doc Velle, like the rest of the town, has been cowed by the xenophobic Robert Ryan-led conspiracy to thwart and ultimately murder Macreedy after he refuses to relinquish his quest for the truth—even though he is outnumbered and apparently incapacitated because of a paralyzed arm (presumably a war wound). Brennan’s Velle is no hero, but he is a man who can no longer abide his association with evil—any more than can Tim Horn (Dean Jagger), the town’s sheriff. Shorn of his sidekick status and of any mannerism reminiscent of his more comic roles, Brennan emerges as the common man’s powerful and utterly believable voice of conscience.

I don't want to go to heaven, I want to go to Claridge's.

after a luncheon party with Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Luise Rainer, Greta Garbo, and two producers—“I think it was a psychological test to see how I would act”—Knopf offered O’Brien work as MGM’s “European Scenario Editor.