Glenn Ford
| Glenn Ford | ||
 Ford in 1955 | ||
| Background information | ||
| Born as: | Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford | |
| Born | May 1, 1916 Sainte-Christine-d'Auvergne, Quebec, Canada | |
| Died | Aug 30, 2006 - age 89 Beverly Hills, California, U.S. heart & circulatory problems at 90 | |
| Spouse(s): | Eleanor Powell (1943 - 1959) divorced Kathryn Hays (1966 - 1969) divorced Cynthia Hayward (1977 - 1984) divorced Jeanne Baus (1993 - 1994) divorced | |
| Children: | Peter Ford | |
| Occupation: | Actor | |
| Years active | 1937–1991 | |
Gwyllyn Samuel Newton "Glenn" Ford (✦May 1, 1916 – †August 30, 2006) was a Canadian-American actor who often portrayed ordinary men in unusual circumstances. Ford was most prominent during Hollywood's Golden Age as one of the biggest box-office draws of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, who had a career that lasted more than 50 years. Although he played in many genres of movies, some of his most significant roles were in the film noirs Gilda (1946) and The Big Heat (1953), and the high school angst film Blackboard Jungle (1955). However, it was for comedies or westerns which he received acting laurels, including three Golden Globe Nominations for Best Actor in a Comedy movie, winning for Pocketful of Miracles (1961). He also played a supporting role as Clark Kent's adoptive father, Jonathan Kent, in Superman (1978).
Five of his films have been selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant: Gilda (1946), The Big Heat (1953), Blackboard Jungle (1955), 3:10 to Yuma (1957) and Superman (1978).
Early life Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford was born on May 1, 1916, in Sainte-Christine-d'Auvergne, Quebec, the son of Hannah Wood (née Mitchell) and Newton Ford, an engineer with the Canadian Pacific Railway. Through his father, Ford was a great-nephew of Canada's first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, and was also related to U.S. President Martin Van Buren. In 1922, when Ford was six, the family moved first to Venice and then to Santa Monica, California; his father (Newton) became a motorman for the Venice Electric Tram Company, a job he held until he died at age 50 in 1940.
While attending Santa Monica High School, he was active in school drama productions with other future actors such as James Griffith. After graduation, he began working in small theatre groups. While in high school, he took odd jobs, including working for Will Rogers, who taught him horsemanship. Ford later commented that his father had no objection to his growing interest in acting, but told him, "It's all right for you to try to act, if you learn something else first. Be able to take a car apart and put it together. Be able to build a house, every bit of it. Then you'll always have something." Ford heeded the advice and during the 1950s, when he was one of Hollywood's most popular actors, he regularly worked on plumbing, wiring, and air conditioning at home.
Ford became a naturalized citizen of the United States on November 10, 1939.
World War II and Eleanor Powell
Ten months after Ford's portrait of a young anti-Nazi exile, the United States entered World War II. After playing a young pilot in his 11th Columbia film, Flight Lieutenant (1942), Ford went on a cross-country 12-city tour to sell war bonds for Army and Navy Relief. In the midst of the many stars also donating their time – from Bob Hope to Cary Grant to Claudette Colbert – he met the popular dancing star Eleanor Powell. The two soon fell in love; they attended the official opening of the Hollywood USO together in October.
Ford made The Desperadoes (1942), another Western. Then, while making another war drama, Destroyer with ardent anti-fascist Edward G. Robinson, Ford impulsively volunteered for the United States Marine Corps Reserve on December 13, 1942. The startled studio had to beg the Marines to give their second male lead four more weeks to complete shooting. In the meantime, Ford proposed to Eleanor Powell, who subsequently announced her retirement from the screen to be near her fiancé as he started boot camp.
Ford recalled to his son that William Holden, who had joined the Army Air Corps, and Ford had "talked about it and we were both convinced that our careers, which were just getting established, would likely be forgotten by the time we got back ... if we got back."
He was assigned in March 1943 to active duty at the Marine Corps Base in San Diego. With his Coast Guard service, he was offered a position as an officer, but Ford declined, feeling it would be interpreted as preferential treatment for a movie star and instead entered the Marines as a private. He trained at the Marine base in San Diego, where Tyrone Power, the number-one male movie star at the time, was also based. Power suggested Ford join him in the Marines' weekly radio show "Halls of Montezuma", broadcast Sunday evenings from San Diego. Ford excelled in training, winning the Rifle Marksman Badge and being named "Honor Man" of the platoon and promoted to sergeant by the time he finished.
Awaiting assignment at Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base, Ford volunteered to play a Marine raider – uncredited – in the film Guadalcanal Diary, made by Fox, with Ford and others charging up the beaches of Southern California. He later showed this to his little boy Peter, along with his many other black-and-white battle scenes in other films. Frustratingly for Ford, filming battle scenes was the closest he would ever get to any action. After being sent to Marine Corps Schools Detachment (Photographic Section) in Quantico, Virginia, three months later, Ford returned to the San Diego base in February 1944 and was assigned to the radio section of the Public Relations Office, Headquarters Company, Base Headquarters Battalion, where he resumed work on "Halls of Montezuma".
Just as Eleanor, now his wife, was expecting the birth of their child and Ford himself was looking forward to Officers Training School, he was hospitalized at the U.S. Naval Hospital in San Diego with what turned out to be duodenal ulcers, which afflicted him for the rest of his life. He was in and out of the hospital for the next five months and finally received a medical discharge on the third anniversary of Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1944. Though without the combat duty he had been hoping for, Ford was awarded several service medals for his three years in the Marines Reserve Corps: the American Campaign Medal, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal, created in 1945 for anyone who had been on active duty since December 1941. After the war, Ford continued his military career in the Naval Reserve well into the Vietnam War, achieving the rank of captain.
Later military service
After serving in World War II, Ford joined up for yet a third time in 1958. He entered the U.S. Naval Reserve, was commissioned as a lieutenant commander and was made a public affairs officer – the position he had portrayed the previous year in the successful comedy Don't Go Near the Water. During his annual training tours, he promoted the Navy through radio and television broadcasts, personal appearances, and documentary films.
Ford continued to combine his film career with his military service, and was promoted to commander in 1963 and captain in 1968, after he went to Vietnam in 1967 for a month's tour of duty as a location scout for combat scenes in a training film entitled Global Marine. In support of Democratic President Lyndon Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam War, he traveled with a combat camera crew from the demilitarized zone south to the Mekong Delta. For his service in Vietnam, the navy awarded him a Navy Commendation Medal. He finally retired from the Naval Reserve in the 1970s with the rank of captain. He was awarded the Marine Corps Reserve Ribbon, which recognizes those who spend 10 years of honorable reserve service.
Personal life
Ford's first wife was actress and dancer Eleanor Powell (1943–1959), with whom he had his only child, actor Peter Ford (born 1945). The couple appeared together on screen once in a short film produced in the 1950s titled Have Faith in Our Children. When they married, Powell was more famous than Ford. Ford and Powell would divorce in 1959.
Ford did not remain on good terms with his ex-wives. He was a notorious womanizer who had affairs with many of his leading ladies, including Rita Hayworth, Maria Schell, Geraldine Brooks, Stella Stevens, Gloria Grahame, Gene Tierney, Eva Gabor and Barbara Stanwyck. He had a one-night stand with Marilyn Monroe in 1962 and a fling with Joan Crawford in the early 1940s.
Ford dated Christiane Schmidtmer, Linda Christian and Vikki Dougan during the mid-1960s, and he also had relationships with Judy Garland, Connie Stevens, Suzanne Pleshette, Rhonda Fleming, Roberta Collins, Susie Lund, Terry Moore, Angie Dickinson, Debbie Reynolds, Jill St. John, Brigitte Bardot and Loretta Young. However, he subsequently married actress Kathryn Hays (1966–1969); marriages to Cynthia Hayward (1977–1984), and Jeanne Baus (1993–1994) would later follow. However, all four marriages would end in divorce. He also had a long-term relationship with actress Hope Lange in the early 1960s. According to his son Peter Ford's book "Glenn Ford: A Life" (2011), Ford had affairs with 146 actresses, all of which were documented in his personal diaries, including a 40-year, on-and-off-again affair with Rita Hayworth that began during the filming of Gilda in 1945. Their affair resumed during the making of their 1948 film The Loves of Carmen; Ford impregnated Hayworth, and she later traveled to France to get an abortion.
In 1960, Ford moved next door to Hayworth in Beverly Hills, and they continued their relationship for many years until the early 1980s.
Ford's affair with stripper and cult actress Liz Renay was chronicled by her in the 1991 book "My First 2,000 Men". She ranked Ford as one of her top five best lovers.
Ford also documented his many relationships by taping every phone conversation he ever had with all of his celebrity lovers and friends for 40 years. Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan are on these recordings, as well as Rita Hayworth, Frank Sinatra, William Holden, John Wayne, Cary Grant, Ava Gardner, Gregory Peck, James Mason, Lucille Ball, James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Angie Dickinson, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Charlton Heston and Debbie Reynolds. Ford installed the recording system to eavesdrop on the conversations of his first wife, Eleanor Powell, fearing that she would find out about his serial cheating and leave him. She later divorced him in 1959 on the grounds of adultery and mental cruelty.
Ford had also been engaged to Debra Morris in the 1980s and Karen Johnson in the early 1990s.
At the height of his stardom, Glenn Ford supported the Democratic Party. He supported Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940s, Adlai Stevenson II in 1956, and John F. Kennedy in 1960. Ford later switched his support to the Republican Party. He campaigned for his old friend, and fellow actor, Ronald Reagan, in the 1980 and 1984 presidential elections.
In May 1980, Ford attempted to purchase the Atlanta Flames, of the National Hockey League, with the intention of keeping the team in the city. He was prepared to match a $14 million offer made by Byron and Daryl Seaman, but was outbid by an investment group led by Nelson Skalbania, which included the Seaman brothers. The group acquired the franchise for $16 million on May 23 and eventually moved it to Calgary.
Ford lived in Beverly Hills, California, where he illegally raised 140 leghorn chickens until he was stopped by the Beverly Hills Police Department.
Death
Ford retired from acting in 1991, at age 75, following heart and circulatory problems. He suffered a series of minor strokes which left him in frail health in the years leading up to his death. He died in his Beverly Hills home on August 30, 2006, at the age of 90.
Legacy
In a 1981 interview, Ford said his favorite of his own films were The Blackboard Jungle, Gilda, Cowboy, 3:10 to Yuma, The Sheepman and The Gazebo. "They may not have been the best pictures I did, but they're the ones I remember most fondly because of the people involved," he said. "People like George Marshall, who directed six pictures with me, and Debbie Reynolds."
Filmography
- Wikipedia article: Glenn Ford Filmography
- More information is available at [ Wikipedia:Glenn_Ford ]
External links
- Glenn Ford at the Internet Movie Database
- Glenn Ford at the Turner Classic Movie Database
- Glenn Ford at the Internet Broadway Database
- Glenn Ford @ Find A Grave
- Official website
- Wikipedia article: Glenn Ford
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Note: Glenn Ford was a volunteer at the Hollywood Canteen |
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