[4][5] Through his father, Ford was a great-nephew of Canada's first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald,[6] and was also related to America's eighth President Martin Van Buren (1782–1862, served 1837–1841).

"[7] Ford heeded the paternal advice and decades later during the 1950s, when he was one of Hollywood's most popular actors, he regularly worked on plumbing, wiring, and air conditioning at his home.

[7] At age 23, Ford gave up his status as a subject of the King (Canadian citizenship) and became a naturalized citizen of the United States on November 10, 1939, taking the oath of allegiance.

This was a well-received courtroom drama in which Ford plays a young man who falls in love with Rita Hayworth when his father, Brian Aherne, tries to rehabilitate her in their bicycle shop.

Top Hollywood director John Cromwell was impressed enough with his work to borrow him from Columbia for the independently produced drama, So Ends Our Night (1941), where Ford delivered a poignant portrayal of a 19-year-old German exile on the run in Nazi-occupied Europe.

"Glenn Ford, a most promising newcomer," wrote The New York Times's Bosley Crowther in a review on February 28, 1941, "draws more substance and appealing simplicity from his role of the boy than any one else in the cast.

"I was so impressed when I met Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt," recalled Glenn Ford to his son decades later, "I was thrilled when I got back to Los Angeles and found a beautiful photograph personally autographed to me.

More routine films followed, none of them memorable, but lucrative enough to allow Ford to buy his mother and himself a beautiful new home in the Pacific Palisades community..

Ten months after Ford's portrait of a young anti-Nazi exile, the United States entered World War II with the Imperial Japanese surprise attack on the Pearl Harbor naval and air bases in Hawaii.

After playing a young pilot in his 11th Columbia film, Flight Lieutenant (1942), Ford went on a cross-country 12-city tour to sell war bonds for Army and Navy Relief.

Then, while making another war drama, Destroyer with ardent anti-fascist Edward G. Robinson, Ford impulsively volunteered for the United States Marine Corps Reserve on December 13, 1942.

[12] In the meantime, Ford proposed to Eleanor Powell, who subsequently announced her retirement from the screen to be near her fiancé as he started Marine Corps boot camp.

Power suggested Ford join him in the Marines' weekly radio show Halls of Montezuma, broadcast Sunday evenings from San Diego.

Ford excelled in training, winning the Rifle Marksman Badge, being named "Honor Man" of the platoon and being promoted to sergeant by the time he finished.

The erotic sadism and covert homoeroticism were actively encouraged on set by director Vidor, a sophisticated Budapest-born expatriate, though Glenn Ford always denied any awareness of the latter in his character's fervent loyalty to his boss, who had unwittingly married the love of Johnny's life.

It has a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and, in 2013, was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

[16] Now established as a star of "A" movies, Ford was borrowed by Warner Bros studios to play Bette Davis' leading man in A Stolen Life (1946).

He also made the mistake, which he bitterly regretted later, of turning down the lead in the brilliant comedy Born Yesterday (also planned with Rita Hayworth), which Holden then snatched up.

Ford made Plunder of the Sun (1953) with John Farrow, then was cast in the lead of The Big Heat (1953), Fritz Lang's classic crime melodrama with Gloria Grahame, at Columbia.

Ford played an idealistic, harassed teacher at an urban high school that included a very young Sidney Poitier and other black and Hispanic cast members.

Ford's versatility allowed him to star in a number of popular comedies, often as a beleaguered, well-meaning but nonplussed straight man facing difficult circumstances.

He received a direct commission as a lieutenant commander in the United States Naval Reserve (a nominally junior yet relatively high rank that took Ford's Hollywood imprimatur into consideration, given his conspicuous lack of an undergraduate degree amid the contemporaneous Cold War-era emphasis on education in the officer ranks of United States Armed Forces) and was initially assigned as a public affairs officer (the same role held by his character in the successful comedy Don't Go Near the Water).

He was again promoted to captain in 1968 after visiting South Vietnam in 1967 for a month's tour of duty as a location scout for combat scenes in a training film entitled Global Marine.

In support of President Lyndon Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam War, he traveled with a combat camera crew from the Vietnamese Demilitarized Zone south to the Mekong Delta.

In 1950, Ford played the title role in The Adventures of Christopher London, created by Erle Stanley Gardner and directed by William N. Robson.

He was a notorious womanizer who had affairs with many of his leading ladies, including Rita Hayworth, Maria Schell, Geraldine Brooks, Stella Stevens, Gloria Grahame, Gene Tierney, Eva Gabor and Barbara Stanwyck.

Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan are on these recordings, as well as Rita Hayworth, Frank Sinatra, William Holden, John Wayne, Cary Grant, Ava Gardner, Gregory Peck, James Mason, Lucille Ball, James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Angie Dickinson, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Charlton Heston and Debbie Reynolds.

Ford installed the recording system to eavesdrop on the conversations of his first wife Eleanor Powell, fearing that she would discover his serial cheating and leave him.

Ford was scheduled to make his first public appearance in 15 years at a 90th-birthday tribute gala in his honor[32] hosted by the American Cinematheque at Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood on May 1, 2006.

Anticipating during the previous week that his health might prevent his attendance, Ford had recorded a special filmed message for the audience, which was screened after a series of in-person tributes from friends including Martin Landau, Shirley Jones, Jamie Farr and Debbie Reynolds.