7. Spencer Tracy - Guess Who's Coming To Dinner
ColumbiaSpencer Tracy spent the majority of his career playing thoroughly exasperated middle-aged father types, but Guess Who's Coming to Dinner took his traditional role and made it contemporary and fresh. When you're a relic of the Father Knows Best era, how do you manage to stay relevant into the rapidly changing 60s? Tracy managed to pull it off with his performance in the racially-charged drama Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, playing Matt Drayton, a father whose progressive daughter has brought her black boyfriend (played by Sidney Poitier) home for dinner to meet her parents. Although Drayton is a liberal, in the 1960s there was a very big difference between supporting civil rights and wanting your daughter to come home with a black man. It took issues of race and brought them into the domestic sphere, in a time when interracial marriage was still illegal in 17 states up until a few months after filming wrapped on this production. Tracy was nominated for an Oscar for his work in this film, but died of a heart attack only 17 days after he finished this film.