Glenn Ford

Glenn Ford was born Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford in Sainte‑Christine‑d’Auvergne, Quebec, Canada, to Hannah Wood (Mitchell) and Newton Ford, a railroad executive. His family moved to Santa Monica, California, when he was eight years old. He began acting in high‑school plays and then performed with West Coast, a traveling theater company. In 1939 Tom Moore, a talent scout for 20th Century Fox, discovered him, and that same year he signed a contract with Columbia Pictures. The contract marked a shift in Columbia’s business model; studio head Harry Cohn had previously relied on loan‑outs from other studios but began developing his own contract stars in the late 1930s, adding Rosalind Russell, Ford and William Holden. Cohn intended to use Ford and Holden interchangeably if one proved difficult, and although they often competed for roles, the two became friends and their careers ran parallel through the 1940s until Holden achieved greater fame in the 1950s. Ford’s official screen debut was in Fox’s *Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence* (1939). He continued in small roles during the 1940s before his film work was interrupted by service in the United States Marine Corps during World War II; he remained in the Naval Reserve, attaining the rank of captain and serving into the Vietnam era. In 1943 Ford married tap dancer Eleanor Powell, and they had one son, Peter Ford. After the war he initially struggled to regain his career momentum but received a postwar break from Bette Davis in *A Stolen Life* (1946). His performance in the film noir *Gilda* (1946) with Rita Hayworth elevated him to major star status. He later appeared in notable films such as *The Big Heat* (1953), *Blackboard Jungle* (1955), and westerns including *3:10 to Yuma* (1957), *The Sheepman* (1958) and *The Rounders* (1965). In the 1970s he debuted on television with *The Brotherhood of the Bell* (1970) and starred in series such as *Cade’s County* (1971) and *The Family Holvak* (1975). During the 1980s and 1990s his appearances were limited to documentaries, occasional films, and a cameo in *Superman* (1978). Ford’s career spanned roughly fifty years and encompassed more than one hundred films.