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Spencer Bonaventure Tracy (April 5, 1900 – June 10, 1967) was an American actor, known for his natural performing style and versatility. One of the major stars of Hollywood's Golden Age, Tracy was the first actor to win two consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor from nine nominations.

He was rumored to be in a relationship with actor John Derek. Scotty Bowers calls his relationship with Katharine Hepburn as fake and an attempt to hide his sexuality. In his memoir Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars (2012), Bowers claimed that Tracy was an alcoholic who drank heavily before having sex and was a bisexual. “The great Spencer Tracy was another bisexual man, a fact concealed by the studio publicity department. That is if they ever knew about it at all,” wrote Bowers. When a journalist asked Bowers how gay was Spencer Tracy, he replied that: “He got drunk and thanked the man beside him in the morning for taking care of him. He didn’t just suck cock, he crunched it!” According to Vanity Fair, Tracy paid men for sex. Veteran author and screenwriter Larry Kramer also claimed that some of Old Hollywood’s biggest stars were gay, including Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. “In the 1930s and ’40s, there were plenty of famous gay actors and directors who partied and socialized together. It certainly was very, very discreet, but everyone knew what was what.”

Tracy first discovered his talent for acting while attending Ripon College, and he later received a scholarship for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He spent seven years in the theatre, working in a succession of stock companies and intermittently on Broadway. His breakthrough came in 1930, when his lead performance in The Last Mile caught the attention of Hollywood. After a successful film debut in John Ford's Up the River (in which he starred with Humphrey Bogart), he was signed to a contract with Fox Film Corporation. Tracy's five years with Fox featured one acting tour de force after another that were usually ignored at the box office, and he remained largely unknown to movie audiences after 25 films, nearly all of them starring him as the leading man. None of them were hits, although his performance in The Power and the Glory (1933) was highly praised at the time. In 1935, he joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, at the time Hollywood's most prestigious studio. His career flourished from his fifth MGM film Fury (1936) onwards, and in 1937 and 1938 he won consecutive Oscars for Captains Courageous and Boys Town. He made three box-office successes teaming with Clark Gable, the studio's most prominent leading man, so that by the early 1940s Tracy was one of the studio's top stars. In 1942, he appeared with Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year, beginning a professional and personal partnership, which led to nine films over 25 years. Tracy left MGM in 1955, and continued to work regularly as a freelance star, despite health issues and an increasing weariness and irritability as he aged. His personal life was troubled, with a lifelong struggle against severe alcoholism and guilt over his son's deafness. Tracy became estranged from his wife in the 1930s, but the couple never divorced; he conducted a long-term relationship with Katharine Hepburn in private. Towards the end of his life, Tracy worked almost exclusively for director Stanley Kramer. It was for Kramer that he made his last film, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), completed just 17 days before he died. During his career, Tracy appeared in 75 films and developed a reputation among his peers as one of the screen's greatest actors. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Tracy as the 9th greatest male star of Classic Hollywood Cinema.[1]

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• Spencer Tracy - Wikipedia