(Before his career was over, he had filmed a total of 16 movies in color, including the movie he was filming when he died.) He was loaned out once, to MGM for Marie Antoinette (1938). The movie was shot in and around Pineville, Missouri, and was Power's first location shoot and his first Technicolor movie. Jesse James was a very big hit at the box office, but it did receive some criticism for fictionalizing and glamorizing the famous outlaw. and This Above All and the swashbucklers The Mark of Zorro and The Black Swan. In these years he starred in romantic comedies such as Thin Ice and Day-Time Wife, in dramas such as Suez, Blood and Sand, Son of Fury: The Story of Benjamin Blake, The Rains Came and In Old Chicago in musicals Alexander's Ragtime Band, Second Fiddle, and Rose of Washington Square in the westerns Jesse James (1939) and Brigham Young in the war films A Yank in the R.A.F.
Power racked up hit after hit from 1936 until 1943, when his career was interrupted by military service. He walked into the premiere of the movie an unknown and he walked out a star, which he remained the rest of his career. Power was billed fourth in the movie but he had by far the most screen time of any actor. Zanuck decided to give Power the role, once King and Fox editor Barbara McLean convinced him that Power had a greater screen presence than Ameche. The director Henry King was impressed with his looks and poise, and he insisted that Power be tested for the lead role in Lloyd's of London, a role thought already to belong to Don Ameche. Among the Broadway plays in which he was cast are Flowers of the Forest, Saint Joan, and Romeo and Juliet. Discouraged, he took the advice of a friend, Arthur Caesar, to go to New York to gain experience as a stage actor. Power's experience in that movie didn’t open any other doors, however, and, except for what amounted to little more than a job as an extra in Flirtation Walk, he found himself frozen out of the movies but making some appearances in community theater. He appeared in a bit part in 1932 in Tom Brown of Culver, a movie starring actor Tom Brown. He went door to door, trying to find work as an actor, and, while many contacts knew his father well, they offered praise for his father but no work for his son. Tyrone Power Jr., as he was then known, decided to continue his pursuit of an acting career. His father suffered a heart attack in December 1931, dying in his son's arms, while preparing to perform in The Miracle Man.
Power joined his father for the summer of 1931, after being separated from him for some years due to his parents' divorce. Upon his graduation, he opted to join his father to learn what he could about acting from one of the stage's most respected actors. Power went to Cincinnati-area Catholic schools and graduated from Purcell High School in 1931. Through his paternal great-grandmother, Anne Gilbert, Power was related to the actor Laurence Olivier through his paternal grandmother, stage actress Ethel Lavenu, he was related by marriage to author Evelyn Waugh and through his father's first cousin, Norah Emily Gorman Power, he was related to the theatrical director Sir (William) Tyrone Guthrie, founder of the Stratford Festival (now the Stratford Shakespeare Festival) in Canada and the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His mother was Roman Catholic, and her ancestry included the French-Canadian Reaume family and Germans from Alsace-Lorraine. His father's ancestry included Irish, English, Scottish, Italian, German, and French Huguenots (the latter through his paternal grandmother's Lavenu and Blossett ancestors). Tyrone Power's sister, Ann Power was born in 1915, after the family moved to California. Power was descended from a long theatrical line going back to his great-grandfather, the actor and comedian Tyrone Power (1795–1841). Power was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1914, son of Helen Emma "Patia" (née Reaume) and the English-born American stage and screen actor Tyrone Power Sr., often known by his first name "Fred".