John Villiers Farrow, KGCHS (10 February 1904 – 27 January 1963) was an Australian film director, producer, and screenwriter. He spent a considerable amount of his five-decade career in the United States and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director in 1942 for Wake Island. In 1957, Farrow won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Around the World in Eighty Days. He had seven children by his wife, actress Maureen O'Sullivan, including actress Mia Farrow.
Farrow was born in Marrickville, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, the son of Lucy Villiers (née Savage; 1881–1907), a dressmaker, and Joseph Farrow (1880–1925), a tailor's trimmer. His parents were both of English descent. Farrow was educated at Newtown Public School and Fort Street Boys' High School, and then started a career in accountancy.
He claimed to have run away to sea in an American barquentine, sailed "all over the Pacific", and fought in revolts in Nicaragua and Mexico. Reaching California, he enrolled at St. Ignatius College (later known as the University of San Francisco) in 1923, but left after one month.
He travelled throughout the Pacific, including Fiji, Hawaii, and Guam. On arrival in Hollywood, Farrow fabricated his education, saying he had attended Newington College in Sydney, Australia (he lived in a street below its ovals), Winchester College in England, and the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Many publications and websites still contain this misinformation.
Farrow started writing while working as a sailor, and became interested in screenwriting after a chance voyage in the South Seas with the filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty. Re-entering the United States, allegedly by jumping ship at San Francisco, he found his way to Hollywood, where from 1927, his nautical expertise brought him work as a script consultant and technical adviser. He had already earned minor recognition as a poet and writer of short stories. Some of his stories were sold to Hollywood.
He soon established himself as a notable screenwriter. He worked for DeMille Productions, doing titles for White Gold (1927) (his first credit) and The Wreck of the Hesperus (1927).
He adapted Richard Connell's 1923 short story "A Friend of Napoleon", but it does not appear to have been made. He also wrote the original story for The Blue Danube and the script for The Bride of the Colorado, both of which were released in 1928. At Warner Bros., he wrote A Sailor's Sweetheart (1927) for director Lloyd Bacon.
Farrow wrote the screenplays for Three Weekends, The Woman from Moscow, The First Kiss, Ladies of the Mob, The Showdown, The Four Feathers, The Wheel of Life, A Dangerous Woman, Wolf Song, The Bad One, Shadow of the Law and Seven Days' Leave.
Farrow wrote an English-French-Tahitian dictionary, as well as a novel, Laughter Ends (1934). In 1932, he went to England, where he wrote The Impassive Footman (1932) for Basil Dean. He worked as a writer and assistant director on G. W. Pabst's film Don Quixote (1933), and briefly visited Tahiti again.
Return to Hollywood and arrest
Farrow returned to Hollywood and re-established himself as a screenwriter. On 27 January 1933, while dancing at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, he was arrested for breach of his visa, as part of a general crackdown against illegal immigrants in the film industry. Farrow was charged with making a false statement while entering the US, having claimed he was Romanian. Although threatened with deportation, eventually he was given five years' probation, before being acquitted of the charges the following year.
At MGM, Farrow wrote Last of the Pagans (1935), partly set in Tahiti, and directed a short, "The Spectacle Maker" (1934). He received a plum appointment to work on Tarzan Escapes (1936), but the film was subsequently rewritten and reshot.
In 1930, Farrow was announced as directing his own story, First Love, but this did not materialise. He signed to Warner Bros. in 1936, looking to direct, and was linked with a number of projects, including a Foreign Legion story and an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's 1842 short story "The Pit and the Pendulum". Farrow finally made his directorial debut in 1937 with Men in Exile, a remake of Safe in Hell (1931).
Following this, he accompanied his wife, Maureen O'Sullivan, to Europe, where she was making A Yank at Oxford (1938), lectured on Father Damien, about whom Farrow had written a book (published in 1937), and received a papal knighthood.
On his return to Hollywood, Farrow resumed working as a B-picture director for Warner Bros., with West of Shanghai (1937) with Boris Karloff and She Loved a Fireman (1937) with Dick Foran and Ann Sheridan. He was reunited with Karloff in The Invisible Menace (1938), then made Little Miss Thoroughbred (1938) with John Litel and Sheridan, the first film for Peggy Ann Garner.
Farrow left his contract for a number of months, ostensibly to finish a book he was writing on the history of the papacy, and also due to disputes over the script for his next film, another starring Kay Francis, Women in the Wind (1939).
Farrow re-emerged as a contract director for RKO, directing the highly profitable The Saint Strikes Back (1939), the second in the "Saint" series and the first to star George Sanders in the lead. He followed it with Sorority House (1939), from a script by Dalton Trumbo and produced by Robert Sisk. RKO then announced Farrow would direct a film version of the director's book Damien the Leper produced by Sisk and starring Joseph Calleia, but it was never made.
"I deliberately set out to become the damnedest commercial director in the business", he said later. "The only way to get anywhere in Hollywood is to make money pictures. Then, you can get some measure of respect and authority from the studio bosses, and little by little you get to do more of the things you want to do."