Francis Ford
actor, director, writer
- Birth name:
- Frank Thomas Feeney
- Born:
- 1881-08-14, Portland, Maine, USA
- Died:
- 1953-09-05, Los Angeles, California, USA
- Professions:
- actor, director, writer
Biography
Long before soundtracks swallowed the screen, Francis Ford—older than his famous sibling John and once the one who showed him where to plant the camera—was already steering silent pictures from behind the lens while doubling as their leading man. When talkies arrived he quietly surrendered the megaphone and, somewhere around 1929, stepped solely in front of it. Thereafter he flourished as cinema’s go-to embodiment of iron-fisted power: the Republican hanging judge in John’s 1935 The Informer could order a man’s doom with a flick of his gavel. Yet the same face could spark comic chaos—cue the octogenarian chieftain in The Quiet Man (1952) who bolts upright from his deathbed, slippers flapping, to catch the film’s climactic fistfight like a slapstick pilgrim chasing a miracle.
