Lee Tracy (born William Lee Tracy) (April 14, 1898 – October 18, 1968) was an American actor.

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, he studied electrical engineering at Union College, and then he served as a 2nd lieutenant in World War I. In the early 1920s he decided to work as an actor. He became a Broadway star by way of his starring role in the original 1924 production of George Kelly's play The Show-Off.

He arrived in Hollywood in 1929, and he started in many pictures as a newspaperman. He played reporter Hildy Johnson in the 1928 staging of The Front Page and a Walter Winchell-type gossip columnist in 1932's Blessed Event. Tracy starred as the columnist in Advice to the Lovelorn (1933), very loosely based on the novel Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathaniel West. He played The Buzzard, the criminal who leads Liliom (Charles Farrell) into a fatal robbery, in the 1930 film version of Liliom. He also played Lupe Velez's frenetic manager in Gregory LaCava's The Half-Naked Truth in 1932, and the following year portrayed John Barrymore's agent in the great comedy Dinner at Eight, directed by George Cukor. His flourishing film career was temporarily disrupted in 1934 while on location in Mexico filming Viva Villa!, featuring Wallace Beery as Pancho Villa, when he stood on his balcony and urinated on a military parade that was passing below in Mexico City. He was fired from the film and replaced by Stuart Erwin.

During World War II he returned to uniform. Tracy did continue on in films and also had two television series in the 1950s, New York Confidential, and was one the actors who portrayed the TV detective Martin Kane. He also was cast as the President in both the stage and film versions of The Best Man (1964), written by Gore Vidal. The movie version featured Henry Fonda and remains practically the only film of the period in which both the protagonists are atheists. Remarkably, Vidal's script was filmed with no studio interference. Tracy received his only Academy Award nomination, as Best Supporting Actor for The Best Man.

Lee Tracy died in Santa Monica, California of cancer on October 18, 1968.

Lee Tracy is a Chicago-area artist. She was born in Maine.

She has received numerous grants from the Illinois Arts Council and has had solo shows at the Lyons Weir Gallery, Artemisia Gallery, and Vedanta Gallery in Chicago. She appeared in "The Chicago Art Scene" . In the summer of 2007 she participated in Chicago's ecologically-themed Public Art project, Cool Globes: Hot Ideas for a Cooler Planet.

Lee Tracy received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1989. She also attended Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design and The Art Institute of Boston.

Rangy, red-headed and straightforward to the bone while possessing distinctively adenoidal vocal tones, this actor with a voracious appetite for high living was a fine cinematic representation of the racy and race-paced style of pre-code Hollywood. Lee Tracy patented with peerless skill the lightning-rod timing and machine gun delivery so identified with that period, and would have continued on handsomely in films had severe typecasting, a quick-trigger temper and a notoriously reckless off-camera life not gotten the best of him. Christened William Lee Tracy on April 14, 1898, the Atlanta-born actor was the son of a traveling railroad superintendent and a former school teacher. Lee attended Western Military Academy in Alton, Illinois while growing up, then relocated with his family to upstate New York. Lee may have studied engineering at Union College in 1918 but he also showed an interest in dramatics and was almost immediately asked to join a theater company upon his graduation. WWI interrupted his nascent stage career when he joined the Army. Following his discharge he cast aside such thoughts of a theater career and instead became a U.S. Treasury Agent. Within two years time, however, he was back via the vaudeville stage and touring stock companies. This all culminated in a most auspicious Broadway debut in "The Showoff" in 1924. It took but a couple of years for Tracy to achieve certified stardom with the George Abbott production of "Broadway" (1926) in which he played a song-and-dance man, receiving the New York Drama Critics Award for his efforts. In 1928, following more vaudeville work, Lee found his penultimate role in the form of Hildy Johnson, the hustling, fast-talking newspaperman, in Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht (I)'s timeless play "The Front Page". If ever an actor and role fit together like a hand in glove, this was it, and it was highly unfortunate, with all due respect to actor 'Pat OBrien (I), that Tracy was not afforded the proper chance to transfer this prototype Broadway part to the 1931 film. During this time he was also developing an off-stage reputation as a carouser and heavy drinker. Nevertheless, Fox Studios immediately signed Tracy and offered up a fine screen debut for him co-starring with Mae Clarke in the early talkie Big Time (1929), as the male half of a husband-and-wife vaudeville team who breaks off with his mate and falls on heavy times while she becomes a star. In Born Reckless (1930) Tracy played the first of his Walter Winchell-like, staccato-styled characters. Tracy was a definitive sign of the times and he went on to perfectly evoke his fast-talking image in such Depression-era films as the drama Liliom (1930) and the ribald comedy She Got What She Wanted (1930). A highly impulsive man run by no one and nobody, Tracy abandoned Hollywood at this early stage of the game and returned to his former glory -- Broadway - appearing to fine advantage in "Oh, Promise Me" and "Louder, Please" in 1930 and 1931, respectively. But films continued to beg for his services. This time it was Warner Bros. He contributed greatly to both the melodrama Strange Love of Molly Louvain, The (1932) and the horror opus Doctor X (1932), and easily stole the proceedings, this time in a comic mode, as the cynical, scandal-sniffing columnist in Blessed Event (1932). Columbia Studios decided to get in on the action with a three-picture deal. Tracy played a no-holds-barred politico in Washington Merry-Go-Round (1932), the title role in Night Mayor (1932) and an ex-con in Carnival (1935). In between, however, trouble started brewing with his unrestrained night life and patterned absences from the set. A fourth big studio, MGM, took him on in 1933 with a contract boost despite his "bad boy" reputation -- yet more personality problems surfaced. Despite excellent perfs in such films as Clear All Wires! (1933), Nuisance, The (1933), Turn Back the Clock (1933), Advice to the Lovelorn (1933), and the MGM classics Dinner at Eight (1933) and Bombshell (1933), both showcasing MGM's comedic sex siren Jean Harlow, Tracy went too far. During the filming of Viva Villa! (1934) in Mexico City, Tracy displayed shocking, ungentlemanly-like behavior that resulted in fisticuffs with the law and a high-profile arrest on public morals charges. MGM not only kicked Tracy off the picture, but felt compelled to apologize publicly to the Mexican people for his disrespect and terminate the actor's five-year contract. Tracy freelanced thereafter, often for RKO, but the quality of his pictures began to slide and his constant rash of quicksilver reporters, columnists and press agents had worn out their welcome. He returned to the stage in both New York ("Bright Star") and London ("Idiot's Delight") and was warmly received. In the midst of it all, he married Helen Thoms Wyse, a non-professional, in 1938 and, defying all odds, made the marriage work. She survived him thirty years later. With his last post-war film at the time being High Tide (1947), Tracy's looks had hardened dramatically and he looked at TV being a possible medium for his talents. Throughout the 50s and early 60s he appeared on a number of shows including "Kraft Television Theatre", "Wagon Train" and "Ben Casey". He also took on series leads such as "Amazing Mr. Malone, The" (1951), "Martin Kane, Private Eye" (1949) and "New York Confidential" (1959). And their was always the stage. Tracy's last hurrah on both Broadway and film was Gore Vidal's blistering political drama Best Man, The (1964). Recreating his 1961 Tony-nominated role of the crusty, terminally ill U.S. President, he received his only Oscar nod for this standout part. The rest of his working years went by with less distinction. In the summer of 1968 he was diagnosed with liver cancer and succumbed to the illness on October 18th of that year in a Santa Monica hospital.