Los Angeles – Glenn Ford, the rangy, laconic actor who in a long and prolific career in films and television portrayed characters from gallant leading men to saddle tramps, died Wednesday. He was 90.
Ford, a top box-office draw in the 1950s whose career spanned more than five decades and more than 100 films, was found dead at his Beverly Hills home by fire-department paramedics just before 4 p.m.
Out of the public eye since the early 1990s, Ford was saluted by American Cinematheque at Hollywood’s Egyptian Theatre in May on his 90th birthday. Ford, who had suffered several strokes, had been expected to attend but ultimately missed the event because of fragile health.
In his prime, Ford posted a string of memorable credits that included “Gilda,” “The Blackboard Jungle,” “3:10 to Yuma,” “The Teahouse of the August Moon,” “Don’t Go Near the Water,” “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father,” “Pocketful of Miracles” and “The Rounders.”
He could play an ambitious, crooked gambler with a soul-saving sense of honor (“Gilda”) or an idealistic yet tough-minded teacher (“Blackboard Jungle”).
As a youth, Ford portrayed a Depression-era store clerk who hitchhiked west in “Heaven With a Barbed Wire Fence,” his first feature picture in 1939, and as a middle-aged character actor he was the surrogate father of “Superman” (1978) in the first feature-length film treatment of the comic-book character.
And although he was never nominated for an Oscar, he was a longtime Hollywood favorite.
In the 1970s, Ford began concentrating on television, portraying Sheriff Sam Cade in “Cade’s County”; the narrator of the children’s series “Friends of Man”; and the Rev. Tom Holvak, a poverty-stricken preacher, in “The Family Holvak.”
He was born Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford on May 1, 1916, in Quebec, the son of a railroad executive and mill owner and nephew of Sir John MacDonald, a former prime minister of Canada.
Ford spent his earliest years in Glenford, site of the family’s paper mill, from which Ford took his professional name. His family moved to California when he was 7.
He was married four times. The first marriage, to dancer Eleanor Powell in 1943, ended in divorce in 1959. They had a son, Peter. Ford married actress Kathryn Hays in 1966, but the marriage lasted only a year. In 1977, he wed actress Cynthia Hayward, a union that ended in divorce in 1984. In 1993, he married Jeanne Baus.
