The son of a prominent banker, his great-uncle, Charles Tufts, was
founder of Tufts College in Boston.
First studied at Phillips-Exeter then broke from the banking tradition
of his family by going to Yale instead of Harvard and studying opera.
In 1959, after a year of staying sober in order to stay in contention
for a prime role in John Wayne's epic The Alamo (1960), he lost the role of Jim
Bowie.
In 1950 he was sued by two women who claimed he bit them both on the
thigh.
Newspapers reported that on August 18, 1946, Tufts was bitten by a black widow spider while asleep on the patio of his home in Beverly Hills.
Had a whole chapter of the Medved Brothers' "Golden Turkey Awards" to
himself: Worst Performance by Sonny Tufts. The winning film was
Government Girl (1943), probably because of the prominence of his female lead,
Olivia de Havilland.