"What is a good actor?" Humphrey Bogart once asked. "To me, Spencer Tracy is a good actor, almost the best. Because 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."

From the time of his screen debut, Spencer Tracy was considered one of the finest actors in motion pictures. And although he disapproved of honoring one single performance each year with the Academy Award, he won two Oscars back-to-back and was nominated for Best Actor nine times--a record equaled only by Laurence Olivier. In 1999, a survey by the American Film Institute ranked Tracy among the ten greatest male stars of all time.

But since his death in 1967, Tracy has also been one of the cinema's most maligned figures, the subject of lurid stories and unsubstantiated claims, many centering on the nature of his 26-year relationship with actress Katharine Hepburn.

Now comes this major new biography--the first in more than 40 years--to set the record straight. Written with access to Tracy's own papers and datebooks--and with the cooperation of his daughter, Susie Tracy--it brings unprecedented clarity and detail to the story of the brilliant but tortured man at the core of the popular legend.

Drawn from interviews with more than 100 friends and co-workers, and Illustrated with 124 photographs--many published here for the first time--SPENCER TRACY is certain to stand as the definitive biography of the man George M. Cohan called "the best goddamned actor I've ever seen."