Spencer Tracy, secara lengkap Spencer Bonaventure Tracy, (lahir 5 April 1900, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, AS - meninggal 10 Jun 1967, Beverly Hills, California), bintang filem Amerika yang kasar yang merupakan salah satu pemeran utama lelaki Hollywood yang paling hebat dan pertama pelakon untuk menerima dua Anugerah Akademi berturut-turut untuk pelakon terbaik.
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Semasa muda Tracy bosan dengan kerja sekolah dan bergabung dengan Tentera Laut AS pada usia 17 tahun. Walaupun tidak senang dengan akademik, dia akhirnya menjadi pelajar utama di Wisconsin's Ripon College. Semasa di sana, dia mengikuti audisi dan memenangkan peran dalam permainan permulaan dan mendapati bertindak lebih sesuai dengan keinginannya daripada perubatan. Pada tahun 1922 dia pergi ke New York City, di mana dia dan rakannya Pat O'Brien mendaftar di American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Pada tahun yang sama, kedua-dua lelaki ini membuat debut bersama Broadway, memainkan peranan sebagai robot dalam RUR Karel Čapek Selama lapan tahun akan datang, Tracy melantun di antara bahagian-bahagian yang ditampilkan dalam permainan Broadway jangka pendek dan peranan utama dalam syarikat saham serantau, akhirnya mencapai kebuntuan ketika dia dilantik sebagai tahanan hukuman mati Killer Mears pada 1930 Broadway yang melanda The Last Mile. Dia kemudian muncul dalam dua subjek pendek Vitaphone,tetapi dia tidak senang dengan dirinya sendiri dan pesimis mengenai peluangnya untuk menjadi bintang.
Nevertheless, director John Ford hired Tracy to star in the 1930 feature film Up the River, which resulted in a five-year stay at Fox Studios in Hollywood. Although few of his Fox films were memorable—excepting perhaps Me and My Gal (1932), 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932), and The Power and the Glory (1933)—his tenure at the studio enabled him to develop his uncanny ability to act without ever appearing to be acting. His friend Humphrey Bogart once attempted to describe the elusive Tracy technique: “[You] don’t see the mechanism working, the wheels turning. He covers up. He never overacts or is hammy. He makes you believe what he is playing.” For his part, Tracy always denied that he had come up with any sort of magic formula. Whenever he was asked the secret of great acting, he usually snapped, “Learn your lines!”
In 1935 he was signed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he would do some of his best work, beginning with his harrowing performance as a lynch-mob survivor in Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936). He received his first of nine Oscar nominations for San Francisco (1936) and became the first actor to win two consecutive Academy Awards, for his performance as the Portuguese fisherman Manuel in Captains Courageous (1937) and for his role as the priest who founded the eponymous facility in Boys Town (1938). In the course of his two decades at MGM he settled gracefully into character leads, conveying everything from paternal bemusement in Father of the Bride (1950) to grim determination in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955). In later years his health was eroded by respiratory ailments and a lifelong struggle with alcoholism, but Tracy worked into the early 1960s, delivering exceptionally powerful performances in producer-director Stanley Kramer’s Inherit the Wind (1960) and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961).
Married since 1923 to former actress Louise Treadwell, Tracy lived apart from his wife throughout most of their marriage, though as a strict Roman Catholic he refused to consider divorce. From 1942 onward, he maintained a warm, intimate relationship with actress Katharine Hepburn. Tracy and Hepburn were also memorably teamed in nine films, including Woman of the Year (1942), Adam’s Rib (1949), Pat and Mike (1952), Desk Set (1957), and Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), which was completed three weeks before Tracy’s death.
