He played Willy Loman in the 1951 film version of “Death of a Salesman.” He played Vronsky in “Anna Karenina,” Jean Valjean in “Les Miserables,” and the William Jennings Bryan part in “Inherit the Wind.” Fittingly for a chameleon, he played Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, for which he got his first Academy Award.
Lately I’ve been on a Fredric March binge. I’m guessing you might need to take a moment to remember who he was. Almost 50 years after his death, he doesn’t have the instant name recognition of other great Hollywood stars of his day — Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Spencer Tracy. March never became a brand. He didn’t want to be a brand. He was an independent star who rejected the Hollywood studio system and built a brilliant stage and film career, choosing leading roles that interested him. He was a chameleon — a great actor who disappeared so thoroughly into each role he played that it’s hard to recognize him from movie to movie. It’s not just his appearance that changes. It’s his entire flavor — his essence.
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In 1937, he starred as the doomed actor Norman Maine in the original version of “A Star is Born.” Maine is a cinema idol whose star has begun to wane. This is something he is initially unaware of and yet subconsciously knows; he has always expected it and feels he deserves it. He loves his wife, an ingenue whose fame is soaring as his career crumbles; he’s supportive of her, jealous, appalled by his own jealousy, relapsing into alcoholism, afraid of becoming a burden. He’s suave and angry and proud and self-loathing, a set of complex layered states that March subtly conveys despite the movie’s somewhat clunky script.
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He couldn’t be more different as Al Stephenson, one of three veterans returning to a small midwestern city after the war in the great 1946 movie “The Best Years of Our Lives.” Stephenson is affable and steadfast, an army sergeant coming home to a loving wife and two nearly grown children. His old civilian pants don’t fit (he’s lost weight) and his old life as a bank executive doesn’t quite fit either. As a sergeant during the war he got to see all kinds of men literally in action: his measure of a person’s worth now has to do with character rather than collateral. March plays Stephenson as a man entitled to resume a prosperous secure existence but troubled by things he didn’t question before. He’s both assured and uneasy. And during a lot of the movie he is — comically and also perhaps ominously — drunk.
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But my favorite March performance is in the 1954 corporate melodrama “Executive Suite.” It’s an ensemble picture about the infighting that happens after the president of a Pennsylvania furniture company drops dead without having named a successor. It’s got William Holden as an idealistic engineering genius, Barbara Stanwyck as the dead president’s on-again-off-again lover who owns the controlling shares of stock, and a number of other terrific actors. March plays a creep: the company’s number-crunching comptroller Loren Shaw. He wants the presidency, he’s wanted it for a long time, and he’s willing to try blackmail to get the votes he needs. He thinks of himself as decisive while everyone around him waffles; he sees himself as the company’s only possible savior. He has a kind of feral certainty — divining the other person’s weakness and deploying that knowledge to his own advantage. Yet he’s also sweatily insecure. (Watching March’s performance made me wish he’d been around long enough to portray Richard Nixon.)
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Taken together, these three Fredric March movies form a trilogy of mid-20th-century America. You get Hollywood, the war and its aftermath, and big business. Each of March’s characterizations is restless and contradictory. Even when he’s smooth, he’s rough.
In his private life, March was a lifelong liberal activist, known for opposing fascism in the 1930s and ’40s, standing up to the Red Scare and the House Un-American Activities Committee in the ’50s, and campaigning for civil rights and racial justice all through his life. He was not only an observer of the American character — he tried to help shape it for the better.
But in his movies he is neither a hero nor a charismatic anti-hero. He’s an artist of the paradoxical who doesn’t go one extra inch toward making a character likable or villainous. His acting is free of editorializing. What he brings to each role is curiosity, sensitivity, and objectivity. His people are always people: good and bad and uncomfortable and real.
Joan Wickersham is the author of “The Suicide Index” and “The News from Spain.” Her column appears regularly in the Globe.