David Hartford

Biography

On a snow-silent January day in 1873, Ontonian, Michigan greeted its newest resident—David Hartford, a boy who would trade Lake Superior winds for klieg lights. By the Roaring Twenties he was coaxing performances from flickering nitrate, steering the camera through the Yukon’s frozen wastes in The Golden Snare (1921), then flipping a deck of cards into the rousing melodrama Jack O’Hearts (1926). That same year he sent audiences chasing a runaway bride in the breezy Western Then Came the Woman. Nearly four decades after his first cry in the Upper Peninsula, his final breath was drawn under the perpetual glow of Hollywood’s sun—October 30, 1932—closing the reel on a man who spent his life projecting dreams onto silver.