It was surprising to hear that
actor Glenn Ford passed away. Some obituaries noted that
Santa Monica High School was Ford's alma mater. Mine too. I acted in student plays put on by the Drama Club--they presented an annual "Glenn Ford Award" for the best actor in a school play (not me). Ford's photo hung in our high school "Hall of Fame." At UCLA we watched "Gilda" in our Film Noir seminar. The Washington Post called him an overlooked Hollywood star, maybe true in Washington, DC--but not in Santa Monica... Here are some facts about his life, from
the LA Times obituary:He was born Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford on May 1, 1916, the son of a railroad executive and mill owner and nephew of Sir John MacDonald, a former prime minister of Canada and a descendant of Martin Van Buren, eighth president of the United States.
Ford spent his earliest years in Glenford, site of the family's paper mill, from which Ford took his professional name.
By the time his family moved to California when he was 7, he had already developed a taste for performing. At Santa Monica High School, he ran track, played lacrosse and excelled in English and drama.
Ford worked with numerous little theater groups and California touring companies as an actor and stage manager before joining the Broadway-bound play "Soliloquy," starring film actor John Beal, in 1938.
But when the play reached Broadway, it closed after only two performances. Ford returned to Los Angeles, and 20th Century Fox hired him for a fourth-billed role in the low-budget "Heaven With a Barbed Wire Fence."
It was not the most auspicious of debuts.
In a 1985 interview with The Times, Ford recalled that the film's director, Ricardo Cortez, told him he would never make it as a movie actor. But soon after, Ford was signed by Columbia. Roles in a string of B pictures followed, until World War II service intervened.
Ford enlisted in the Marine Corps in December 1942, after having been a member of the Coast Guard Auxiliary for a year. After his discharge in 1945, he returned to the screen the next year in three notable pictures: "Gilda"; "A Stolen Life," in which he played opposite Bette Davis; and "Gallant Journey," a film biography of 19th century flight pioneer John Montgomery.
In "Gilda," where Rita Hayworth performs one of the steamiest dances in movie history, Ford was praised by Variety as "a far better actor than the tale permits."
