Trivia

Following his Sept. 13, 1951, beating at the hands of Tom Neal over the affections of starlet Barbara Payton, Tone was hospitalized for almost a week and needed plastic surgery to repair his badly damaged face.

In his later years, Franchot Tone was plagued by illness, where his ex-wife, Joan Crawford, helped care for him, the pair having remained friends long after their divorce.

He is responsible for the establishment of the Best Supporting Actor/Actress categories in the Academy Awards, owing to his supporting performance (and subsequent Best Actor nomination) in Les révoltés du Bounty (1935).

His personal favorite of the films he starred in was Les Trois Lanciers du Bengale (1935).

Franchot Tone was one of the original members of the Group Theater (1931-1940), the first acting company in America to bring Stanislavski's revolutionary acting techniques to America. He was also the first to leave the company for a Hollywood contract. A few years later another company member, Julie Garfinkle, (John Garfield) followed Tone to Hollywood. Both movie stars considered their days at the Group the most satisfying years of their lives, and both continued to subsidize the theater's productions until the Group Theater's demise.

He was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6560 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California on February 8, 1960.

He attended The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania; Cornell University (where he graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1927); and Rennes University in France.

Franchot Tone has the distinction of co-starring (with Ann Sothern) in the first American film to play in newly-liberated Copenhagen (May 1945), following Denmark's five-year German occupation in World War II; the film is Mon mari court encore (1939).

Spent most of his summer vacations at an old family home in Point Comfort, now part of Gracefield, Quebec, where he would hunt and fish. One of his young neighbors during the summer was Gilles Carle.

His father was Dr. Frank Jerome Tone, a pioneer in the electrochemistry field. He was once the president of the Carborundum Company of America. Franchot's brother, Frank Jerome "Jerry" Tone Jr., also worked for Carborundum. His mother was Gertrude Van Vrancken Franchot Tone, who was of Dutch American, French and Scottish ancestry.

In August 1940 he was exonerated of being a Communist at a special hearing before the house committee investigating un-American activities at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. However, in 1949, Tone was listed as one of "Stalin's Stars" in "The Red Treason in Hollywood" published by Myron C. Fagan.

In an interview congratulating Joan Crawford on having three of her four husbands simultaneously join her for lunch, Tone's first name was pronounced with a silent T.

He is related to Theobald Wolfe Tone, a famous Irish patriot.

His two sons with Jean Wallace are Pascal Franchot Tone and Thomas Jefferson Tone.

He was a chain smoker. According to John Strasberg, Tone smoked two packs of unfiltered Camel cigarettes a day.

Mentioned in She-Wolf in Hollywood: The Story of Maria Ouspenskaya (2024) as one of Ouspenskaya's acting students.

Franchot Tone was cremated after which his ashes were kept on a shelf in his son's library, surrounded by the works of Shakespeare, until July 24, 2022, when they were interred in the Point Comfort Cemetery, Quebec, Canada.

Ex-brother-in-law of Hal Le Sueur.