Glenn Ford

May 1, 1916 - August 30, 2006
Genially restrained character actor whose career flourished through Hollywood's postwar golden area

IN A career which lasted nearly six decades and spanned the golden era of Hollywood, Glenn Ford appeared in more than 100 films, notably Gilda (1946), opposite Rita Hayworth, The Big Heat (1953) and Pocketful of Miracles (1961), for which he won a Golden Globe best actor award. A specialist in quietly intense character roles, he also appeared in a clutch of memorable westerns. His screen personality — honest, reliable and sternly amiable — was, perhaps, more impressive than some of the films in which he appeared. Perhaps too he was not always ideally cast — the few opportunities he was given to play light comedy suggest that this style might have given more scope to his talents than his usual dramatic and adventurous roles.


Glenn Ford was born Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford in Portneuf, Quebec, in 1916, the son of a railway executive. The name Gwyllyn reflected his mother’s Welsh origins, and many of his relatives still live in the North of England. The family moved to Santa Monica, California, when he was 7. After high school he did various odd jobs — including a stint as stableboy for the American humorist and star Will Rogers — but his heart was set on acting. In 1935 he made his stage debut as a grocery boy in a production of The Children’s Hour by the Santa Monica Players.

His first film part came in a Paramount short, Night in Manhattan, in 1937, after which he landed a few stage roles in New York. In 1939, the year in which he adopted US citizenship, he returned to Hollywood for a sentimental B-picture, Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence (1939).

Although the dozen films he made before leaving for military service, as well as his own roles in them, were forgettable, Ford was becoming known around the film colony. Joan Crawford even eyed him as a marital prospect, but lost interest when she discovered he was about to go off to serve in the Marine Corps.

After the war, during which he served in France and was awarded the Légion d’Honneur, he returned to acting. Columbia showed its appreciation of the returning war veteran by giving him what turned out to be one of the best parts of his career. He had already worked with Rita Hayworth on the undistinguished The Lady in Question (1940), and now he co-starred with her in the phenomenally successful Gilda (1946) — it featured the famous “clothed striptease” that made Hayworth an erotic icon of 1940s Hollywood.

The studio was to team Ford and Hayworth again in The Loves of Carmen (1948) and Affair in Trinidad (1952), but without repeating the success of Gilda. After Gilda he was hired out to Warners, where Bette Davis had demanded him as her co-star in A Stolen Life (1946).

In 1953, after appearing in a score of films, including several westerns, Ford got his next really worthwhile picture, Fritz Lang’s brutal thriller The Big Heat. This was perhaps his best film, as he plays the honest policeman whose stand against corruption drives him from idealism to vengeance.

A second thriller with Lang, Human Desire (1954; based on the Emile Zola novel, La Bête humaine) was less successful, but in 1955 Ford’s career was powerfully revived with Blackboard Jungle (1955).

True, the film owed its runaway success more to Bill Haley and the Comets’ song Rock Around the Clock which helped to launch the rock’n’roll era, than to Ford’s intense performance as a determined young teacher in a slum school. MGM was nevertheless sufficiently impressed to give Ford one of the last long-term contracts it awarded to an individual star.

If his role in The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956) seemed to type him as a genial, democratic service officer, he also appeared in such entertaining westerns as 3:10 to Yuma (1957) and The Sheepman (1958). In the 1960s, however, he starred in a run of three uneven remakes: Cimarron (1960), A Pocketful of Miracles (Frank Capra’s remake of his own Lady for a Day) and Vincente Minnelli’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962).

A Pocketful of Miracles, for which Ford was loaned out to United Artists, gave rise to much legend about the conflicts between Ford and his co-star, Bette Davis, after Davis was moved out of her star quarters to accommodate Ford’s off and on-screen girlfriend, Hope Lange. Ford did little to mollify Davis when he said he was helping her to make a comeback. “That ****,” she said, “wouldn’t have helped me out of a sewer.”

These slightly disappointing films seemed almost to dog Ford’s reputation. He had taken first place in the listing of moneymaking American stars of 1958; ten years later he appeared on Variety’s list of overpriced stars.

After a final run of westerns — A Time for Killing (1967), The Last Challenge (1967), Day of the Evil Gun (1968), Heaven with a Gun (1969) and Smith! (1969) — Ford worked mostly in television, starring in two TV series, Cade’s Country (1971) and The Family Holvak (1975).

From the 1970s his film appearances were rare: there was a last western, Santee (1973), and he played strong supporting roles in Midway (1976) and as the hero’s earthly father in the hugely successful Superman (1978).

One late appearance, after a Canadian horror, Happy Birthday to Me (1981), was fittingly dignified, however, as the American President in a Japanese disaster movie, Virus (1980). He retired in 1991, after shooting a thriller, Raw Nerve, and Final Verdict, a TV drama.

Ford seems not to have been a particularly easy collaborator. David Swift, his director on Love is a Ball (1962), went so far as to liken him to “a 12-year-old temperamental child. Were he mine I would have spanked him physically.”

Ford himself said, “If they try to rush me, I’d always say I’ve got only one other speed, and it’s slower.”

Still, in private life there was something of the warm earnestness of the screen persona, to judge at least from the citation given when in 1955 the magazine Photoplay honoured Ford and his then wife, Eleanor Powell, for their “deep devotion to religious and civil life and for their contribution to the youth of the nation”.

Ford was married, and divorced, four times. His wives were Eleanor Powell (from 1943 to 1959), by whom he had one son, the actor Peter Ford; Kathryn Hays; Cynthia Hayward and Jeanne Baus.


Glenn Ford, actor, was born on May 1, 1916. He died on August 30, 2006, aged 90.