David M. Hartford on AllMovie

A well-known stage actor/director who had been an associate of the legendary Oliver Morosco for five years, Michigan-born David M. Hartford made an auspicious screen debut in the title role of Captain Kidd (1913), a three-reel Bison presentation. He played Mary Pickford's father in the first screen version of Tess of the Storm Country the following year and would continue to play character roles, great and small, until his death in 1932. But Hartford was even better known as a director and was a member of the "committee" that produced the powerful and still extant anti-war melodrama Civilization (1916). Another surviving Hartford production is the 1919 Back to God's Country, a splendid outdoor melodrama featuring the "Queen of the Northwoods," Nell Shipman.