The Motion Picture Industry has always been a tough working field. Getting started in this business usually led down a rough path. It meant hard work in finding topics and plots that would interest people and finding producers and funds to pay for the high expenses. Once one got established in movie making, the competition ran fierce. One had to maintain a name and strive to make movies that would be popular to the public. In a field that revolved around entertaining people, names of great movie actors and directors always rose up out of the crowd. These people were known for providing the best movies. On February 1st, 1895, one of these people was introduced to the world. Born in Cape Elizabeth, Maine; John Ford was going to become one of the world's greatest movie legends.
Ford's birth name was actually Sean Aloysius O'Feeney. His parents, John and Barbara, were both Irish immigrants who came to the United States separately and met after they both arrived.
John Hay Residence
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Birthplace of Carl Laemmle, LaupheimThey never knew each other in Ireland but shared similar backgrounds. They got married in 1875 and went on to live a rather hectic life having to move often to accommodate both a growing family and different financial situations. In 1889, John O'Feeney decided to move to a small one hundred-acre farm near Cape Elizabeth. It was here that John Ford was born. John (Sean Aloysius), also known as Jack to his family, was ninth of thirteen children, however only nine survived into adulthood. The second child, Delia, died at the age of three from measles. Infant mortality took the lives of three others as mortality rates ran as high as fifty percent in the late 1800's.
John Ford lived a rough childhood. Ford's parents had a rough time supporting the nine...