Hollywood Actors Archives

Glenn Ford

Glenn Ford’s career is in definite need of reappraisal. He appeared in many quality movies throughout his years making movies. He starred in many different genre of film. His roles in two film noirs “The Big Heat” and “Of Human Desire” contain depths of complexity and ambiguity. In both his leading lady was the great Gloria Grahame. He made Westerns such as “Jubal” and comedy e.g. “Don’t Go Near the Water”. He died in 2006 at the age of 90. A biography on Glenn Ford was published in 2012.

“Guardian” obituary:

The hairstyles signposted Glenn Ford’s long and active career; from the full and wavy to the sleek, dark gigolo look, to the short back and sides, to a severe crewcut that gradually shrivelled like dry grass on the prairie. His face, that began boyish in prewar B films, hovered somewhere between the rugged handsomeness of William Holden and Tom Ewell’s Thurberesque one, allowing him to be extremely dour in films noirs or to display the righteous nobility of a lone western hero, while also being able to play perplexed characters in comedies.

For Ford, who has died aged 90, was a versatile Hollywood star able to shift genres while retaining his sincere screen persona. Although his realistic speech and timing seemed to owe something to the Method – he often had a mumbled and hesitant delivery – the closest he ever came to the Actors’ Studio was as Marlon Brando’s co-star in The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956).

Born in Quebec of Welsh descent, he was the son of a railroad executive and mill owner, the nephew of Sir John MacDonald, a former prime minister of Canada. Another Ford kinsman was Martin Van Buren, the eighth president of the United States. Ford had tried a variety of jobs, becoming interested in the theatre, and was acting on stage in California when he was signed to a contract with Columbia Pictures in 1939.

At the beginning of his career he was in a number of undistinguished B pictures – an exception being John Cromwell’s anti-Nazi drama So Ends Our Night (1941) – but the films improved and Ford stayed with the studio until the mid-1950s. This period was interrupted by war service in the US marines, part of his activities consisting in the training of French Resistance fighters. (He later became a commander in the US naval reserves and served in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968.)

Matured from his war experiences, Ford, and millions of hot-blooded men all over the world, lusted after gorgeous Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1946), as she peeled off her long black gloves in a symbolic striptease while singing Put the Blame on Mame. The sexual chemistry between the two stars was so strong on the set that Columbia mogul Harry Cohn, who considered Hayworth his private property, had microphones hidden in her dressing room in case she started an affair with her leading man. But they quickly found the mics and teased the eavesdropping boss with risqué conversations.

At the time, Ford was married to leggy, toothy dancer Eleanor Powell, who retired from the screen to become plain Mrs Glenn Ford in 1943. (They divorced in 1959.) Yet Cohn paired Hayworth and Ford again in the listless and Bizet-less The Loves of Carmen (1948), in which Rita was a sexy Gypsy to Ford’s stiff Don José, and also in Affair in Trinidad (1952), another exotic melodrama.

Among Ford’s best films at Columbia were the two he made for Fritz Lang. In The Big Heat (1953), the audience is made to discover and experience the events subjectively as Ford’s cop does, while he mercilessly conducts a retributive investigation into the death of his wife in a car bomb explosion. Ford’s achievement was in the creation of a cold and calculating yet sympathetic character, who permits himself some warmth on the death of the pathetic gangster’s moll (Gloria Grahame).

In the same team’s Human Desire (1954), an updating of Zola’s La Bête Humaine, already filmed by Jean Renoir in 1938, Ford’s steely passivity allowed the other performances to bounce off him effectively.

In 1955, he gained a crewcut and went over to MGM, where he made an immediate impact in The Blackboard Jungle as a novice New York schoolteacher confronted with a class of hooligans. It was also the film which effectively launched Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock on the world. Ford’s pipe-smoking intensity suited the liberal worthiness of the picture, as did his lawyer defending a Mexican boy accused of rape and murder in Trial, of the same year.

Ford then switched successfully to comedy as the affable, ineffectual occupation army officer Fishy in The Teahouse of the August Moon, trying to bring American-style democracy to Okinawa, but who goes native himself, and the bumbling navy PR man trying to do likewise on a South Pacific island in Don’t Go Near the Water (1957).

At the same time, Ford made three Delmer Davies westerns. There was the brooding Jubal (1956), in which he inspires the Othello-like jealousy of Ernest Borgnine; 3.10 to Yuma (1957), in one of his rare villain parts, and Cowboy (1958), as Jack Lemmon’s tough, drunken partner.

At his busiest in the 1950s and 1960s, Ford moved smoothly from the serious rodeo drama The Violent Men (1955) and the horse opera The Fastest Gun Alive (1956) to the biopic operatics of Interrupted Melody (1955) as the husband of a Wagnerian soprano stricken with polio, to the comedy western The Sheepman (1958) opposite Shirley Maclaine. He good-humouredly played Damon Runyon’s bootlegger Dave the Dude in Frank Capra’s farewell film, A Pocketful of Miracles (1961). However, in his autobiography, Capra petulantly blamed Ford for the heavy-handed production’s failure.

There followed two movies by Vincente Minnelli. The first was The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962), in which he was unhappily cast in Rudolph Valentino’s old role, but he exuded charm in the title role of The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (1963) looking for a mother for the then nine-year-old future director Ron Howard.

In the 1970s, Ford was more occupied as the hero of the series Cade’s County on TV than on the big screen, but nevertheless he cropped up from time to time to walk down a dusty street with spurs jangling in minor westerns and cameos in TV series and war pictures. One of his last feature film appearances was as Pa Kent in Superman (1978), the muscle-bound hero’s adopted father. The critic Pauline Kael thought it inspired casting because Ford’s resources as an actor had contracted to the point where he had become a comic-book version of the good American.

Ford, who was married and divorced four times, is survived by his son by Eleanor Powell.

· Glenn (Gwyllyn Samuel Newton) Ford, actor, born May 1 1916; died August 30 2006

His obituary by Ronald Bergan in “The Guardian” can also be accessed online here.

Yul Brynner obituary in “The Los Angeles Times”.

Yul Brynner can claim two iconic roles to his credit. He will forever be associated with the musical “The King and I” where he played King Mongkut of Siam. He first played the role on Broadway in the early 1950’s and won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the film in 1956. His other celluloid image is as Chris Larabee Adams in the hugely popular “The Magnificent Seven”. For trivia fans, can you name the other six actors who formed the magnificent seven without checking on the internet.

His obituary in “Los Angeles Times:

Yul Brynner, who with shaved head and regally haughty presence played and replayed the starring role in “The King and I” for more than 30 years, died early today in a New York Hospital. He was 65.

With him when he died at 1 a.m. at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center were his wife, Kathy Lee, and his four children, said Josh Ellis, the actor’s spokesman.

“He died of multiple complications that came as a result of what was originally cancer,” Ellis said. “He faced death with a dignity and strength that astounded his doctors. He fought like a lion.”

“He was a remarkable person,” Charlton Heston, who starred with Brynner in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 movie epic “The Ten Commandments,” told the Associated Press. “His work in ‘King and I’ was beyond compare. He was a very special talent. I’m very sorry to hear of his death.”

FOR THE RECORD – Yul Brynner: The obituary of actor Yul Brynner in the Oct. 10, 1985, Section A reported his birth date as July 11, 1917. According to public records, he was born July 11, 1920.

Though there were other Broadway and movie roles for Brynner, it is doubtful that any successful actor of his time had been so associated with a single character as was Brynner with the arrogant, bombastic King of Siam.

None of Brynner’s other parts were nearly as memorable as the king. If he became typecast, it was something Brynner didn’t seem to mind. For one thing, there were certain physical limitations that kept him from a wider variety of parts.

“I would have liked to play Henry Higgins (in ‘My Fair Lady’),” he told a Times interviewer a decade ago, “but I couldn’t because of my accent and looks. Unless I did it with an Outer Mongolian touring company.”

For another, the money from the play, the movie, and the seemingly countless touring companies of the play made him a millionaire.

Born Taidje Khan on July 11, 1917, on the island of Sakhalin off northern Japan, Brynner was the son of a Mongolian mining engineer and a Gypsy mother who died at his birth. His father was born in Switzerland and later secured Swiss citizenship and changed the family name to Brynner.

For the first eight years of his life, young Yul lived in China, and then was sent by his father to live with his maternal grandmother in Paris, but she died soon afterward. He attended a Paris school for a time, but dropped out at the age of 13 and joined a Gypsy troupe as a traveling minstrel.

He worked as an acrobat in a French circus for three years, performing on the high trapeze. But after a bad injury, Brynner turned from the circus to the stage.

It was acting that brought Brynner to America, touring in a struggling Shakespearean troupe on college campuses. He added English and some Russian (learned from other actors) to his collection of languages that included French, Japanese and Hungarian while playing small parts and driving the troupe’s bus–all for $25 a week.

In February, 1946, he made his debut on Broadway, playing an Oriental prince opposite Mary Martin in “Lute Song.” After 142 performances, Brynner took the show on tour.

But Brynner had doubts about his ultimate success as an actor. Years later, he remembered one night on stage–long before “The King and I”–when an outraged theatergoer hit him with a shoe. “And it was a perfectly serviceable shoe,” he said. “The man must have really hated me.”

Brynner returned to New York in 1948, putting aside his stage acting ambitions and settling comfortably into the role of actor, director and producer in the fledgling television industry, ultimately directing episodes of “Studio One,” one of the more successful live, anthology television shows of the 1950s.

But Brynner fell in love with the script of “The King and I” when Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein offered him the role. Hammerstein had seen Brynner in “Lute Song,” thought well of him and was influenced by Martin’s recommendation.

The musical story of the imperious Thai king and the proper British teacher, Anna Leonowens, who went to Siam in the 1860s to instruct the king’s huge flock of offspring and then had to acclimate herself to his court habits of polygamy and bowing at ground-level, had a rocky start when it opened out of town in New Haven, Conn., in February, 1951.

“It was a disaster,” Brynner said in 1981. “It was almost five hours long. There was nothing but conflict between Anna and the King. . . . Rogers and Hammerstein understood immediately that unless there was an underlying fascination (between the two characters), then there really couldn’t be a fascinating show.”

With the book cut and sweetened, as well as a couple of new songs added (“Shall We Dance” and “Getting to Know You”) the show, starring Gertrude Lawrence and Brynner, opened in New York at the St. James Theater on March 29, 1951. It was a first-night hit.

“Richard Rodgers told me, ‘You opened. You have a hit. Now freeze it,’ ” he said in late 1984, just before opening in yet another Broadway revival of the show.

The above “Los Angeles Times” obituary can also be accessed online here.

A website on Yul Brynner can be accessed here.