Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford (May 1, 1916 – August 30, 2006), known as Glenn Ford, was a Canadian-born American actor. He was most prominent during Hollywood's Golden Age as one of the biggest box-office draws of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and had a career that lasted more than 50 years.
Ford often portrayed ordinary men in unusual circumstances. Although he starred in many genres of film, some of his most significant roles were in the films noir Gilda (1946) and The Big Heat (1953), and the high-school drama Blackboard Jungle (1955). For comedies and Westerns, though, he received acting laurels, including three Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy, winning for Pocketful of Miracles (1961). He also played a supporting role as Superman's mild-mannered alter ego Clark Kent's adoptive farmer father, Jonathan Kent, in the first film of the franchise series 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).
Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford was born on May 1, 1916, in Sainte-Christine-d'Auvergne, Quebec, Canada the son of Hannah Wood Ford (née Mitchell) and Newton Ford, an engineer with the Canadian Pacific Railway. In 1922, when Ford was aged six, the family emigrated southwest across the border into the United States, first to Venice, California, and then to Santa Monica, west of Los Angeles; his father became a motorman on a tram/streetcar for the Venice Electric Tram Company, a job he held until he died at age 50 in 1940, when his son Glenn was 24.
While attending Santa Monica High School, Glen was active in school drama productions with other future actors, such as James Griffith. After graduation around 1934, he began working in small theatre groups. While in high school, he took odd jobs, including working for comedian and entertainer 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 paternal advice and decades later during the 1950s, when he was one of Hollywood's most popular actors, he regularly worked on plumbing, wiring, and air conditioning at his home.
At age 23, Ford gave up his status as a subject of the King (Canadian citizenship) and became a naturalized citizen of the United States on November 10, 1939, taking the oath of allegiance.
Ford acted in West Coast stage companies and had a role in the short Night in Manhattan (1937) before joining Columbia Pictures in 1939. His stage name came from his father's hometown of Glenford, Alberta.
His first major movie part was in Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence (1939) at 20th Century Fox studios, written by Dalton Trumbo. Ford's first movie for Columbia was a "B", My Son Is Guilty (1939). He went on to other "B" movies, such as Convicted Woman (1940), Men Without Souls (1940), Babies for Sale (1940), and Blondie Plays Cupid (1941).
Ford was in the bigger-budgeted The Lady in Question (1940), which co-starred Rita Hayworth. This was a well-received courtroom drama in which Ford plays a young man who falls in love with Rita Hayworth when his father, Brian Aherne, tries to rehabilitate her in their bicycle shop. Directed by Hungarian emigre Charles Vidor, the two rising young stars instantly bonded.
Top Hollywood director John Cromwell was impressed enough with Ford's work to borrow him from Columbia for the independently produced drama So Ends Our Night (1941), where Ford delivered a poignant portrayal of a 19-year-old German exile on the run in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Working with Academy Award-winning Fredric March and wooing (onscreen) 30-year-old Margaret Sullavan, (who had been nominated for an Academy Award for 1938's Three Comrades), Ford's portrayal of a shy, ardent young refugee riveted attention even in such stellar company. "Glenn Ford, a most promising newcomer", wrote The New York Times's Bosley Crowther in a review on February 28, 1941, "draws more substance and appealing simplicity from his role of the boy than anyone else in the cast."
After the film's highly publicized premiere in Los Angeles and a gala fundraiser in Miami, President Franklin D. Roosevelt saw the film in a private screening at the White House and admired the film greatly. Young Ford was invited to Roosevelt's annual Birthday Ball. Inspired and enthused by the President, he returned to Los Angeles and promptly registered as a Democrat and a fervent FDR supporter. "I was so impressed when I met Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt", recalled Glenn Ford to his son decades later, "I was thrilled when I got back to Los Angeles and found a beautiful photograph personally autographed to me. It always held a place of high honor in my home."
His next picture, Texas, was his first Western, a genre with which he would be associated for the rest of his life. Set after the American Civil War, it paired him with another young male star also under contract, William Holden, who became a lifelong friend. More routine films followed, and Ford made enough to allow him to buy his mother and himself a new home in the Pacific Palisades community.
So Ends Our Night also affected the young star in another way; in the summer of 1941, while the United States was still neutral in the Second World War, he enlisted in the United States Coast Guard Auxiliary, though he had a class 3 deferment (for being his mother's sole support). He began his training in September 1941, driving three nights a week to his waterfront unit in San Pedro and spending most weekends there.
He continued to appear in movies for Columbia such as Go West, Young Lady (1941) and The Adventures of Martin Eden (1942).
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 with the Imperial Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor naval and air bases in Hawaii. 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 popular dancing star Eleanor Powell. The two soon fell in love; they attended the official opening of the Hollywood USO canteen together in October.
Ford made The Desperadoes (1942), another Western. Then, while making another war drama, Destroyer with ardent antifascist 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 on their picture. In the meantime, Ford proposed to Eleanor Powell, who subsequently announced her retirement from the screen to be near her fiancé as he started Marine Corps boot camp.