Wallace Ford

Wallace Ford, born Samuel Grundy Jones on 12 February 1898 in Bolton, Lancashire, England, was an English-American vaudevillian, stage performer, and screen actor who appeared on Broadway between 1921 and 1939. His Broadway credits include Kindred, Of Mice and Men, The Nut Farm, Gypsy, and Pigs, among other productions. He died on 11 June 1966.

Ford's early life was marked by hardship. Born into a working-class family of limited means, he was placed at age three into a Barnardo's orphanage by his uncle and aunt, who were unable to support him alongside their own children. At seven, he was among a group of children sent to Canada under the British Empire's programme to settle farming foster families in the territory. He was adopted by a family in Manitoba but was ill-treated and repeatedly ran away, being resettled multiple times by Canadian authorities. At age eleven, he joined a traveling vaudeville troupe called the Winnipeg Kiddies, which provided his initial training as a performer.

The name Wallace Ford came to him through tragic circumstances. In 1914, the sixteen-year-old Jones and a companion named Wallace Ford rode a freight train south into the United States. Ford was killed beneath the train's wheels during the journey, and Jones later adopted his traveling companion's name as his own stage name. He subsequently served as a trooper with the United States Cavalry at Fort Riley, Kansas, during World War I, before entering American vaudeville with a stock company. In 1919, he performed in an adaptation of Booth Tarkington's Seventeen, which ran for several months in Chicago before transferring to Broadway. He became a successful Broadway performer through the 1920s, including the lead role in Abie's Irish Rose. It was during the run of that production in 1922 that he met Martha Haworth, who was performing as a chorus girl in the same show; the two later married and had one daughter, Patricia, born in 1927 and died in 2005. In 1938, Ford returned to Broadway to play George in the original production of Of Mice and Men. He became a naturalized United States citizen on 8 May 1942, at which time he also legally changed his name from Samuel Grundy to Wallace Ford.

Ford made his credited film debut in Possessed in 1931, appearing alongside Clark Gable and Joan Crawford. The following year he was given the lead in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Freaks, directed by Tod Browning. Over a career spanning more than thirty years, he appeared in more than 150 films. In the 1930s and 1940s he took lead roles in Hollywood B movies including The Rogues' Tavern (1936), Murder by Invitation (1941), and Roar of the Press (1941), while also appearing in supporting roles in larger productions such as The Lost Patrol (1934), The Informer (1935), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Spellbound (1945), and Dead Reckoning (1947). In 1945 he appeared in Blood on the Sun alongside Jimmy Cagney. In the late 1940s and early 1950s he transitioned into character work, appearing frequently in Westerns and in multiple productions directed by John Ford, who favored him as a supporting player.

During the 1950s and into the early 1960s, Ford worked increasingly in television. He held a recurring role in the Western series The Deputy, starring Henry Fonda. His final television appearance came on The Andy Griffith Show in 1964, in which he played Roger Hanover, a former acquaintance of Aunt Bee who attempts to leverage an implied engagement to Bee in order to obtain a payoff from Andy. His final film role was Ole Pa in A Patch of Blue (1965), for which he received a Golden Laurel nomination. Ford died six months after that film's release. Following the death of his wife in February 1966, he moved into the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California, where he died of heart failure four months later. He was buried in an unmarked grave at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City.