Spencer Tracy was born on April 5, 1900. One of the most famous American actors who appeared in a long list of great films.
Photographer KG Kristoffersson took some rather unique pictures of him when he visited Stockholm in 1952.
I found one of the pictures published in the weekly magazine Året Runt no. 49 in 1952.
Tracy, who had been to Norway on a visit (I remember fishing for salmon), suddenly felt the urge to see the Swedish capital in Oslo. He managed to find a taxi driver willing to take him there. According to the brief text, Tracy changed drivers at the wheel several times when they got too tired.
Once in Stockholm, he was shown the film Barabbas together with director Alf Sjöberg. It says night screening. Maybe they wanted to avoid attention and used a cinema at night. Tracy says that he would love to play the lead role.
The strange thing is that the film Barabbas did not premiere in Sweden until the following year, on May 5, 1953 at the Royal cinema. The film had been shown at the Cannes Film Festival the month before. (sneak premiere)
I read that the filming should have been underway at the time the pictures were taken. Number 49 is only a few weeks away from the turn of the year and according to the Swedish Film Database, additional footage was taken up to and including December 1952. You also have to take into account the press release, which could have lasted anything from a week to even longer.
Maybe the film had already begun to be worked on so much that a good chunk of it was finished and cut. This is a tricky riddle.
The pictures show Spencer Tracy and Alf Sjöberg in the cinema, which I unfortunately have no idea which one.
In one of the pictures, a third person is visible, the face is familiar but I can't remember his name.
How Kristoffersson managed to snoop on the news that Spencer Tracy was in town is difficult to know exactly, but I know that KG was also on the set of the movie Barabbas.
Spencer Tracy died in 1967 at the age of 67.
I have photographed the image of the newspaper article and archived it in a completely new way. In the cloud. The cloud has the ingenious function that it analyzes all my images of the newspaper articles and makes them searchable. In this case, I searched for Spencer Tracy and voila, the image appeared. I, who now have so many thousands of images, am of course grateful for that, which saved a huge amount of time, if I even managed to find it.